The Mysterious Case of “Disappearing” AppleCare

One of our colleagues took his iPhone 6s for repair at a local Apple Store and found out that the serial number had been replaced. Essentially, according to Apple database, his iPhone had gone through a warranty exchange some months prior. Thus rendering his actual iPhone no longer eligible for warranty repair.

Perplexed by this issue, he reached us to us. In turn, we contacted Apple for some clarifications. Unofficially according to Apple:

  1. There was an error in the database entry for another iPhone 6s.
  2. The iPhone was reported stolen.
  3. There could be fraudulent warranty-exchange request.

Apple is quick to recognized this issue and started the process of restoring the AppleCare registration on the iPhone 6s.

In this happened to you, don’t panic. Gather all the documents pertaining to the purchase of the iPhone. If you bought an iPhone from authorized iPhone reseller or directly from Apple, it would be really easy to get your AppleCare registration restored. Remember if you kept the receipt, invoice, purchase order and/or the info of the credit card you used to make the purchase; that would make the process much easier too. Contact Apple for support and service, immediately.

We have heard incident like this happened in the past and this is the first time it happened to one of our colleagues.

Scam Alert: Fake Virus Warning to Make Users Call 1-855-420-8247

A tip from reader:

Scam Alert 1-855-420-8247

A pop-up warning showed up on Safari claiming the viruses were found on the computer. It was almost impossible to quit Safari as the pop-up re-emerges when closed. One way to deal with this is to force quit (Command-Option-Escape) Safari, then disable the auto-resume feature in OS X. In OS X Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks, go to System Preferences > General > and uncheck the “Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps” option.

In the upcoming OS X Yosemite, the option looks slightly different; well, more than slightly different.

Check the “Close windows when quitting an app” option.

Close-windows-when-quitting-an-app

This particular scam has been around for a while.

It seems the scammer was astroturfing the comments on this page.

Junk in the iTunes App Store

As of September 9, 2014 Apple announced that there are 1.3 million apps in the App Store. Pretty sure the 1.3 million figure include the junk in the App Store.

I was re-downoading XCOM: Enemy Unknown on my iPad, and I saw an app titled:

GamePRO – X-COM Enemy Within Edition

XCOM in the App Store

I had a hunch, so I checked out this “GamePRO – X-COM Enemy Within Edition” app. My hunch was right; this is a junk app.

IMG_0701

The reviews shows that this app is completely misleading.

IMG_0702

This “developer” seems to have a lot of apps published in the App Store. All of them are complete junk.

Junk in the App Store Michelle Bernardo

Info on they “developer”:

Michelle Bernardo
IngeniusGames.com

Junk App Michelle Bernardo IngeniusGames_com

This is what IngeniusGames.com look like:

IngeniusGames_com

It is a WordPress site with sample contents from the theme. I wonder how Apple App Store Team approved any apps from this so called developer?

If you see this kind of misleading, scummy junk apps, please report it to Apple.