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July 16th, 2020
Imagine being out and about, running your usual errands, when suddenly your phone warns you that your phone battery only has a 20% charge. You panic knowing that you can’t let your phone die in case anyone needs to contact you while you’re out of the house and rummage through your bag hoping you brought your portable charger. When you realize it’s not in your bag, you sigh in defeat as you hurry to continue shopping before your phone dies… until you see the glorious public phone charger staring at you. You look through your bag once more and realize you brought your phone charging wire, so you plug it in the public phone charging station to charge. A week later, your data gets stolen due to juice jacking, accounts are hacked, bank accounts are drained, and you realize that the public charging station wasn’t as secure as you thought. That’s when you realize that maybe you should’ve bought a USB condom to protect your phone and information.
What is Juice Jacking?
Scammers put malware in public charging stations or a USB cable to steal people’s stored information on their phones, and then steal it to take people’s life savings and/or perform identity fraud. This type of practice is called “juice jacking” since people plug in their phone to “juice up” their battery and then scammers “jack” their information. In just a few hours, many people use a public charging station on a daily basis and access their private information, not knowing that they are being watched.
These same people then go into shock when they realize that someone else was watching them as they were entering and looking at private information on their phones. Most people assume their phones can’t get hacked, so they don’t take the same necessary precautions to protect their information as one may do with their computer. However, everyone should take these extra steps to make sure that their phone is protected, and if you must charge your phone at a public charging station it is always a good idea to have a USB condom on hand.
What are USB Condoms?
USB condoms are devices that you plug into your USB phone charging wire before plugging it into your public charging station or a public computer so that you can protect your information as you charge your phone. This can turn any USB port on your phone charging wire into a charge-only cable, preventing syncing from happening on any device. This prevents people from stealing your information and also prevents your personal information from showing up on a public computer.
How Do USB Condoms Work to Prevent Juice Jacking?
The USB condom electronically disables the data pins on your connector, which prevents your data from being synced on the device you’re charging with and turns your cable into a charge-only cable. This allows you to charge your device worry-free, as you know your information won’t be shared with anyone.
At the same time, the information stored on the computer can’t be transferred onto your phone, so you won’t have to worry about your storage being compromised by unwanted information stored on the computer you’re trying to charge with. This will also prevent malware and viruses from being transferred onto your phone.
Social Catfish is Here to Help You
If scammers have still found a way to steal your data and you found out any information about the scammer, Social Catfish is here to help you! We can reverse search any name, email address, phone number, social media username, or image of the suspected scammer to see who stole your information so that you can report it to local authorities and prevent scammers from juice jacking your phone. You can also check out our YouTube channel for more tips and tricks on how to avoid scammers and what to look out for.
