Yesterday I received a text (gif) from my mom of Anderson Cooper rolling his eyes.

[RamblingRose]

At first I thought it was a funny response to our text conversation and was impressed she remembered how to send a gif. She asked me why I sent her a picture of Anderson Cooper and wanted to know what he was doing. Then I told her that she sent me the gif. I asked if anyone where she lives had access to her phone but the gif was sent within a minute if not seconds of our other texts.

She has an iPhone 8 Plus along with an iPad & MacBook Air. I told her to call Apple to see if they can help her since I'm 500 miles away. They have always been very helpful to her in the past. My mom is 90 so I always feel sorry for the rep that gets her call. LOL

Any thoughts?

[Sneederbunk]

1. A piece about a photo without the photo?

[Tetrachloride]

2. Background questions

1. what apps were in use ?
a. Apple Messages
b. WhatsApp
c. FaceBook Messenger or
d. other

2. does she still have the messages ? perhaps in delete box ?

3. and do you ?

4. do you have any ad-blockers or anti-spam active ?

5. do you have social media accounts such as facebook ?

[RamblingRose]

4. She uses iMessage. She has a FB account but rarely uses it and doesn't use Messenger.

She still has the text which was only the gif.

I don't know about ad-blockers or anti-spam.

I don't think she had any apps running since just the night before I had her close all apps and restart her phone & iPad. I'll double check.

The timing of the text is uncanny.

I need to tell her to carefully look at all the messages she's sent recently.

[Tetrachloride]

5. I am going to suspect a very carefully forged

message. For a while, I tried repeatedly to block a sender. To rephrase, Apple didn’t block all that they could and didn’t verify the sender.

[CloudWatcher]

3. Probably Forged

Sadly forged phone calls (caller-id) and fake SMS text messages are common. I get
bogus texts and phone calls all the time.

They very likely don't have access to your (or your mother's) phones, but have copies
of your (one or both) contacts list and are trying to get you to respond before doing
something truly evil.

All too often messaging apps want to download your contacts-list to make it easy to
communicate with friends. But then they've got your data and it's another possible
source for the hackers to start doing things like this.

Of course it's a good idea to run a malware scan (using legit software, not scare-ware
crap someone has tried to sell you on the internet!), but odds are there's nothing on
your systems to remove.