31 AUG 2026 — A phishing service called AnonyMousKIT uses an AI voice agent posing as Apple Support to talk the owners of stolen iPhones into reading out their passcodes. Activation Lock is not being broken. It is being asked for politely, using the contact details the owner supplied to get the phone back.
How the service works
SOCRadar's research describes a platform running since early 2024, connected to 506 domains and feeding 168 storefront brands that resell stolen devices. It automates the retrieval of the codes needed to disable Activation Lock, and it also handles Apple ID harvesting, iCloud backup access and Keychain credentials.
Researchers recovered records of 200 calls made between 31 August 2025 and 30 May 2026, with 55 distinct interaction transcripts. One voice AI agent runs five personas, all carrying the same translated identity, Alice from Apple Support, in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Of the 200 calls, 179 went to numbers in Brazil.
Lost Mode is the attack surface
The detail that is not in the headlines is the one that changes what a reader should do.
When a phone is stolen, the owner puts it in Lost Mode and enters a contact number so that an honest finder can return it. The device then displays that number on its locked screen. The thief reads it, and now has a verified way to reach the owner, plus certain knowledge of which device model was taken and when.
That is why the call is convincing. The caller knows the phone was lost, knows the model, and rings the number the owner themselves published. The victim, for good reasons, has supplied every detail that would normally make a support call implausible — all through a feature working exactly as designed.
The recovered transcript shows the agent asking the victim to confirm ownership, then requesting the four or six-digit passcode and reading the digits back for confirmation. Reading back is a customer-service convention that signals legitimacy, and it also verifies the digits before the criminal relies on them.
The security control is not the thing that failed
Activation Lock works. A locked iPhone cannot be reactivated without the Apple ID credentials, which is why stolen iPhones are worth far less as devices than as parts, and why this whole industry exists.
What defeats it is a person. That is a design consequence, not a defect. Any recovery mechanism that lets a legitimate owner regain access is a mechanism a criminal can attempt to walk the owner through. Apple could make the passcode unrecoverable, and then every owner who genuinely forgot it would lose their device permanently.
This is the same shape as the McKesson intrusion, where voice phishing produced single sign-on credentials that opened Salesforce and Snowflake. In neither case is there an exploit. There is a phone call, and an authentication system doing what it was built to do once it has been given the right answer.
What the AI part actually adds
Voice phishing is not new. What the AI agent changes is not the convincingness of the call.
The transcript, by the account of it, is unremarkable: confirm ownership, request the passcode, read it back. A competent human caller has always been able to do that. What changes is scale and cost. One agent handling five personas in three languages, available at any hour, means the marginal cost of attempting a call falls close to zero, and a criminal enterprise can now attempt every device it steals rather than only the ones worth a person's time.
The multilingual capability is more significant than it appears. Regional language coverage used to be a real barrier: a Brazilian victim required a Portuguese-speaking caller on the payroll. That constraint is gone, and it is the constraint that historically kept these operations concentrated in a few markets.
Why 179 calls to Brazil is the number to watch
The geographic concentration says something about where this is being tested rather than where it will stay.
Brazil has high smartphone theft rates, a large Portuguese-speaking population and an established resale market, which makes it a natural first market. Nothing in the platform is specific to it. The service already runs three languages, and the economics that made Brazil worth 179 of 200 calls apply directly to Southeast Asia, where phone theft is common in dense urban centres and where the same secondhand device markets exist.
The language barrier was the main constraint, and the AI agent removes it. A regional operator would need Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese and Tagalog, and adding a language to a voice agent is a configuration change rather than a hiring problem.
What to do, concretely
There are three concrete steps to take, and the first will feel wrong.
Consider what you put in the Lost Mode message. A phone number invites a call from whoever has the device, which is, after all, the point. An email address you monitor separately gives an honest finder a route while making a convincing voice call harder to place.
Treat any inbound contact about a lost device as hostile, regardless of what the caller knows. Knowledge of the model, the loss and your number is evidence that someone has your phone, not evidence that they work for Apple. Apple does not ring people to ask for a passcode, and no legitimate support process ever needs it.
And never read a code aloud. The read-back is the tell: a real support agent has no reason to hear your device passcode, and hearing it confirmed is the only thing the caller actually came for.
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