decent if you can prove ownership over devices that have been associated with it.
Comment on Daily discussion thread: Thursday, May 9, 2024
Baku@aussie.zone 4 months ago
So I found an iCloud account I setup half a decade ago with a phone number I no longer have. But I had SMS 2FA setup 😬
I still have access to the email bound to it, and know the password, and through old emails I was able to figure out which phone number was associated with it. I also still have the MacBook I registered the account with, although I think I just setup a new account rather than going through all the motions, and it has been reset a few times, so it’s not recorded as a trusted device anymore.
Bet time: what do we reckon the likelihood of apple removing the 2FA is? My guess is probably a 35% chance they do, assuming nobody has my old number yet (if they do and they called apple and were like “yo what do? I didn’t make no iCloud request dawg” then that probably goes down to like a 15% chance, unless the apple people asked for more info and confirmed that at the very least they aren’t me, and can use that in their investigations, in which case it probably goes up to 75%)
spoiler
Tbh I don’t really care that much, I only used it so that they’d stop hassling me about linking an iCloud account, so there’s nothing on there I care about. But it is registered with my main email address, and I’d rather use that than trying to remember what other email I used for the new one
TinyBreak@aussie.zone 4 months ago
Baku@aussie.zone 4 months ago
I initiated the request from my MacBook so hopefully. But if they ask for actual proof of ownership I’d be screwed. I don’t generally keep receipts for 6 years, but I wasn’t the one who bought it anyways
Nath@aussie.zone 4 months ago
If someone claiming to be Apple called me and started asking me to confirm any of my personal details, I’d tell them politely to go away.
Baku@aussie.zone 4 months ago
Presumably it’d be more of a “if you didn’t request this, contact apple at apple.com/contact” or something like that, but yeah.
Nath@aussie.zone 4 months ago
If someone new has the phone number now and they have registered an iCloud to that number, Apple should be able to see there are two accounts on the number.
If you are able to tell them that one of them is no longer you, that helps them know who they need to call.
If someone from Apple called me up and said “Hi, it’s Apple here, are you Nath from somestreet in Perth?” I’d be a lot more cooperative. I wouldn’t volunteer anything, but if they knew that I was the account holder and knew I registered it after you no longer used it, and then asked me whether I had another iCloud account, I’d freely volunteer that I did not.