iCloud hack costs North Carolina mom thousands of cherished photos, videos

(InvestigateTV) — Imagine losing access to tens of thousands of precious family memories with the click of a button.

That’s exactly what happened to this mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, after hackers gained control of her iCloud account.

Samantha even attempted to reject their login attempt. While working from home, she received a notification that someone was trying to access her iCloud from Jakarta, Indonesia.

After she clicked reject, Samantha received emails indicating her iCloud password and trusted phone number had been changed, effectively locking her out of her account permanently. The hackers quickly accessed her Apple Pay, setting up recurring charges through gaming apps that would have cost her $100 weekly if undetected.

Most devastating was the loss of irreplaceable family moments, including video of her son meeting his newborn sister when she came home from the hospital.

Samantha discovered that the content she thought was stored on her phone actually lived only in the cloud, making recovery impossible once access was lost.

What You Can Do to Prevent iCloud Hacks on Your Account

Cybersecurity expert Theresa Payton explains that data breaches have made personal information widely available to criminals who use AI algorithms to target potential victims.

She advises users to “back up, stop and think” when receiving unexpected security notifications and to verify requests through official company websites rather than responding immediately.

Our investigators reached out to Apple for a statement. A spokesperson did not provide a statement regarding this incident, but did suggest customers turn on Stolen Device Protection in their iPhone settings.

Turning on those settings creates a security delay, so if someone is trying to change your password, they’ll have to wait an hour and then perform a Face ID or Touch ID authentication to move forward.

Additional protection measures include using different passwords across accounts, avoiding oversharing personal details on social media, and enabling two-factor authentication for extra security layers.

If you have content on your phone that you don’t want to lose, you should consider backing it up on an external hard drive.

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