I acknowledged that entering my info into a phishing site wasn't brilliant (eventhough domain name included .apple.com) I was able to get a hold of Apple quick enough for them to catch the mistake and they were successfully able to prevent the phone (via serial and imei) from switching ownership (it is still currently linked to my icloud) and cannot be activated, they also placed the serial number on Apple's list of banned phones, new owner can't purchase anything on itunes/app store. Mistakes where made lets move past this. I'm not blaming Apple, I just want something good to come out of this and maybe we can stop these *******s from continuing to steal our beloved devices.
I was trying to inform people of what happened so that it can be prevented in the future.
The phone was in lost mode (within 5 minutes of being stolen) whoever the person who took it had either shut it off or put it in airplane mode. Without being notified of my phone resurfacing via a connection to the internet, I think it is safe to assume that siri was never in play here because siri requires an internet connection. And if that had occured I would have been notified via findmyphone the location of my device.
They were able to somehow determine my phone number (Currently think the SIM card was the culprit) and use that information to send me the fake apple support alert that my device had been found. THIS IS CONCERNING. Because apple has security features that are set in place to prevent this from happening, this is why the phones are programmed to star out the icloud account when it prompts for it. Apple Support would not send an imessage to me so this should have been a red flag. However, most people would fall for this since they are anticipating a message from findmyiphone if/when the device reconnects to the internet. The phishing site itself was a clone of the apple site, every link worked (they were actually hyperlinked to the official apple site).
If anyone has any other ideas on how they discovered my phone number, please let me know.
However the people that tricked me into giving them my icloud information, used an icloud account to message me
apple.app.icloud@icloud.com . Apple is currently investigating the account as I am sure it has been used several times to commit fraud. They have the account holders information, which I was told is in Japan. They probably signed up using an alias but worth a shot. I also looked up the domain registrar...these pricks were too cheap to pay for private domain registration so the information they used to setup the site was visible to anyone. Name, phone number, address (Shanghai, China), even their company name.