Hidden iPhone screen almost no one knows about reveals if you've been scammed – and it's a costly nightmare to sort out
A LITTLE-KNOWN page in your iPhone settings reveals if you're been scammed.
The easy-to-miss info screen shows important details that can expose a costly scam that you've fallen for.
Advertisement
6
A clever Apple menu reveals if you've been scammed
Credit: Apple
6
You'll find it tucked away in your settings
Credit: Apple
It works by showing if your
There are two ways this clever feature can expose a con.
First up is for anyone buying an iPhone, specifically someone picking up a
This
Advertisement
Read more on iPhone
But someone might secretly have repaired the iPhone using fake parts, and not warned you about it.
Now you've got an iPhone that might break down or not work properly.
And you'll have to pay to get the parts swapped out for genuine Apple components.
Fake parts can also affect the resale value of your iPhone too.
Advertisement
Most read in Phones & Gadgets
The other con this exposes is if a dodgy repair shop has used fake parts to fix your iPhone and not told you.
They might have pretended that they used legit Apple components, and charged you full price.
iPhone 16e review – I've secretly tested Apple's cheapest mobile and I love the new button but that's not the best bit
"Find out if any parts have been replaced," Apple advises in a memo about buying new iPhones.
It adds: "If it isn't in the condition you expected, return it."
Advertisement
HOW TO CHECK FOR FAKE IPHONE PARTS
First, go to Settings > General > About.
If the iPhone is running iOS 15.2 or later then you may be able to see a section called Parts and Service
History
.
6
The section only appears if your iPhone has had parts replaced
Credit: Apple
This will
showcase
various parts of your iPhone, and whether they're legitimate.
Advertisement
"If a part is labelled Genuine Apple Part, the part has been replaced with a genuine Apple part using genuine Apple parts and processes," Apple explained.
"If a part is labelled Unknown Part, this means that the installation is incomplete.
"Or the part was replaced with a non-genuine part, was previously used or installed in another iPhone, or isn't functioning as expected."
If you don't see any section titled Parts and Service History, it means that your iPhone hasn't had any parts replaced.
Advertisement
But if you've got strange parts in your iPhone, it can lead to trouble – and costly repairs.
"Genuine Apple parts are designed to fit precisely within the device and provide optimal performance, safety, and reliability," Apple xplained.
"Repairs performed by Apple and Apple Authorised Service Providers are covered by Apple's warranty.
6
Seeing the Genuine label is a good sign – it means your iPhone has been repaired with legit Apple parts
Credit: Apple
Advertisement
"Repairs performed by untrained individuals or using non-genuine parts might affect the functionality, safety, security, and privacy of the device."
Apple adds: "Using non-genuine batteries might also result in unexpected behaviour after installation, device software updates, or while charging.
"Using non-genuine batteries might also lead to safety issues."
OTHER CHECKS TO MAKE
That's not the only thing you need to check if you're buying a second-hand iPhone.
Advertisement
THE DAMAGE TO WATCH OUT FOR
Apple says to look out for these serious damage types in its official advice:
Serious damage might affect the functionality of the iPhone.
If necessary, remove the case and any accessories from the iPhone.
Check for scratches on the display.
Check the sides and back of the iPhone for scratches, scuffs, and dents.
Inspect the Lightning connector for damage or debris.
Picture Credit: Apple / The Sun
You can also go to Settings > Battery > Battery
Health
to see the health of the battery.
All smartphone batteries degrade over time. That's just how rechargeable lithium-ion batteries work.
As you charge and discharge them, they chemically age, and can ultimately hold less charge overall.
After 500 charge cycles (which would take normal users about two years), a battery would typically only hold 80% of the charge it held when it was new.
Advertisement
6
Go into your iPhone's Battery settings to check up on its Battery Health
Credit: The Sun / Apple
That means you have to recharge your iPhone more often.
A severely degraded battery can also cause performance issues for your iPhone, resulting in a slower experience overall.
So always check the Battery Health and Maximum Capacity readouts before buying a new iPhone, otherwise you might have to
Advertisement
You'll also want to check to see if the iPhone is locked to a specific phone network.
6
You'll want to look at Battery Health and Maximum Capacity before buying a second-hand iPhone
Credit: The Sun / Apple
This doesn't happen with new phones in the UK, but older phones may be locked.
Go to Settings > General > About and look for Network Provider Lock. If it says No SIM restrictions then the phone is unlocked.
Advertisement
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Daily Mirror
a day ago
- Irish Daily Mirror
Honor 400 Lite review: premium iPhone styling & excellent battery for under €300
Back in my halcyon days of DJing, there was nothing more exciting than having a new record before anyone else. The same applies to being a tech reviewer - it's a massive privilege and pleasure to get to test new products before they go on sale in Ireland, especially when it is before other reviewers too. Honor 400 Lite is one such piece of kit. I've been having fun with this incredible phone for a couple of months ahead of its arrival in Harvey Norman and Three this month. It's an incredible device because of the refined and elegant experience you get for your money, starting with the stunning 6.7in full HD+ AMOLED display with a superfast 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 3,500 nits that is unusually high for a handset in this price range. The superslim Honor 400 Lite lives up to its name by weighing just 171g and it is comfortable to hold and use. The review unit was matte black in colour but it's also available in green and grey. Honor 400 Lite has just one rear camera of note to shout about, a 108MP wide angle shooter that delivers especially pleasing shots in decent lighting. It comes with a dedicated AI camera button similar to iPhone 16's Camera Control and it works efficiently as both a zoom controller and shutter button. You can also record video by pressing the button for longer and you can set it to shoot photos in burst mode which is handy for capturing fast moving subjects. The main camera works superbly as a macro camera, capable of sharp close-up shots at 2x and 3x that include impressive bokeh. Within the app you can turn on an iPhone-style Live Photo feature to automatically record a short three-second video and then select the best frame as the still image. Another handy tool is Highlights Capture which can detect smiles, people jumping or running and pets and instantly grab an image. It's useful for grabbing hands-free selfies from the 16MP front camera just by smiling. You will get decent results from the main camera's Portrait mode and Night mode. To use the full 108Mp resolution, you need to switch on High-Res mode which is found under the More tab in the camera app. There's also a Pro mode that offers a decent amount of customisation but it does not shoot in 108MP. However, there is no RAW capture. Honor 400 Lite is driven by a MediaTek Dimensity 7025-Ultra processor coupled with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage. The software is the firm's own MagicOS 9.0 atop Android 15. It is sleek and easy to navigate with plenty of customisation options. The OS is not quite as flawless as, for example, Oppo's ColorsOS but the user experience on the 400 Lite is without hiccups. Performance is top notch for everyday use. Like other phones in this price range, it's not powerful enough for serious gaming but aside from that you'll find it fast and fluid. When not in camera mode, a long press of the camera button opens Google Lens by default. This enables you to search images or translate text almost instantly. Honor 400 Lite has a relatively large 5,230mAh power pack and most people who buy this device will get up to two days out of the battery from a single charge. There is support for 35W charging which is not lightning fast but this is a budget phone and those speeds are not far off the flagships from Samsung and Apple. Honor has included iPhone-esque styling elements such as the Magic Capsule display at the top of the screen, rounded corners, and completely flat and metal-coloured edges. This gorgeous handset does not feel like a €299 phone. The IP65 rating means it is dustproof and splashproof and can withstand an occasional dash of water during everyday use. The unit also boasts Wet-hand Touch technology that means the screen is responsive even in the rain. There is an under-display fingerprint sensor that is reliable but not as fast as the ultrasonic sensor on Honor's flagship devices. You also get NFC, Bluetooth 5.3, dual speakers and support for Wi-Fi 2.4GHz and 5GHz up to the 802.11ac standard. Honor 400 Lite does a great job of delivering premium iPhone-style features on a budget-priced phone. In 2025, this is a competitive price point with options from Nothing and Samsung offering plenty of competition. But anyone who buys this Honor unit should be pleased by the value-for-money feature set. Honor 400 Lite costs €299 sim-free and is available from Harvey Norman and Three. You can also buy it from Amazon.
The Irish Sun
a day ago
- The Irish Sun
WhatsApp users blocked from sending messages as app stops working on three beloved iPhone models
TIME has run out for a number of WhatsApp users on iPhone after a short reprieve. The app was 2 May 5 deadline was pushed back Credit: Getty 2 iPhone 6 Plus among the handsets affected Credit: Getty However this was pushed back a few weeks, according to Now, time is well and truly up with a new cut off deadline striking last night. Although the affected models are older there are still a small percentage of people using them today. It's all come about because Read more about WhatsApp Previously, you needed at least iOS 12 but that's now been upped to iOS 15.1. For most iPhones, that's not a problem as they can be upgraded to the newer software for free. But the tech on some older iPhones are considered too dated to handle these updates, so they're left behind. There are three iPhone models that are newly unable to use WhatsApp as such. Most read in Tech These are: iPhone 5s iPhone 6 iPhone 6 Plus WhatsApp reveals exacty how to block one of your contacts The oldest among them is the iPhone 5s, which was released more than 10 years ago. "Devices and software change often, so we regularly review what operating systems we support and make updates," WhatsApp says. "Every year we look at which devices and software are the oldest and have the fewest users. "These devices also might not have the latest security updates, or might lack the functionality required to run WhatsApp. "Before we stop supporting your operating system, you'll be notified in WhatsApp and reminded a few times to upgrade." WHAT TO DO IF I'M AFFECTED Sadly, if you want to continue using WhatsApp the best option is to upgrade your phone. Of course, the trusty SMS text message will still work, as well as Apple's own iMessage, so you could switch but you won't have key features like groups anymore as you do on WhatsApp. If you do opt for an upgrade, it doesn't have to be the most expensive option around. Even Apple has a new cheaper version of the iPhone. The latest being the And there are plenty of good Android options around too if you're tempted to switch, such as the
The Journal
2 days ago
- The Journal
What the hell happened to Google search?
LET'S SAY YOU want a list of Irish ministers. So you google it, of course. The fact that it's its own verb sums up pretty neatly Google's total dominance of online search. 'I'll Bing it,' said no-one, ever. (Sorry, Microsoft.) is the world's most used website . Ninety percent of internet searches go through the company's search engine. It's the front door to the internet, and a navigational tool on which we have become entirely dependent. Who among us has typed out a url in the last decade? Whether you have an Android or an Apple phone, that's Google search you're using when you open your browser. But something has gone wrong. Search for 'Irish ministers' and the top result is… Pat Breen? ( The Journal checked this on several users' desktop browsers with the same result.) Breen was never a minister. He was a junior minister – and that was a while ago now. He lost his seat two elections ago, in 2020. A government website with a full list of current government ministers is quite a bit down the results page. Pat Breen, the Platonic ideal of an Irish minister, according to Google. Google Google Sponsored posts The utility of the search engine has been particularly eroded when it comes to anything that could be sold to you, with top results likely to all be from companies that have paid to skip up the ranking to a position where they would not have organically surfaced. These paid-for top results, which take up more and more space on the search engine results page, are also partly based on your browsing history rather than what you are currently looking for. So a search from an Irish location for 'the best place to buy children's shoes', for instance, can contain sponsored top results for (a) shops that don't sell children's shoes or (b) British online-only retailers. (Good luck buying children's shoes without trying them on.) There are useful results amid the debris of sponsored links and below the paid-for top table, but it feels like harder work than it once was to find them. This isn't helped by the fact that sponsored links are not very visually distinct from organic results. It's hard not to click on them. Ads on search are how Google makes most of its money. ChatGPT's challenge to Google And then, of course, there's the new AI Overview that, for the past year, has appeared in response to certain types of queries. Now, the integration of AI into search is about to be turbocharged as Google goes on the offensive against ChatGPT. It may not be its own verb yet, but for many people, OpenAI's chatbot is becoming as automatic and intuitive a go-to as Google. Liz Carolan, a tech consultant and author of The Briefing newsletter, says that while Google hasn't shared data on the drop-off in people using its search engine, all the signs are that the switch to ChatGPT has been 'profound'. Where once we would have googled, 'what time is the Eurovision', now we are asking chatbots. So Google is becoming a chatbot too. In May, Google began to roll out the next step up from AI Overview. AI Mode, which has been launched in the US, will deliver customised answers to users' questions, including charts and other features, rather than serving up a lists of links. These answers will be personalised based on past browsing history. You will even be able to integrate it with your Gmail account to allow further personalisation. At first, AI Mode will be a distinct option in search, but its features and capabilities will gradually be integrated into the core search product, Google has said . Carolan says this will be as fundamental a change to how we interact with the internet as the original arrival of Google search. 'Instead of navigating between links, we're going to end up using a single interface: a chatbot querying the websites that exist and delivering back to you its interpretation of that, in a conversational style,' she explains. An example of an AI Overview result in Google. Google Google AI nonsense The first problem is, Google's AI results can be nonsense . Kris Shrisnak, a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties working on AI and tech, says people need to understand one fundamental point about the large language models (LLMs) on which chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini AI are based: they are not designed to be accurate. 'When they're accurate, they are coincidentally accurate,' Shrisnak says. 'They're accurate by accident, rather than by design.' For example, Carolan recently wanted to check how many working days there are in June. Google's AI-generated top result helpfully explained that there are 21 working days and no public holidays in June. If you specify 'in Ireland', Google says there are 22 working days and no public holidays. Both answers are wrong. There are 20 working days in June, and the first Monday is always a public holiday. ChatGPT didn't know that either. It counted the bank holiday twice. Google isn't planning to take Monday off. Google Google 'It's just blatantly inaccurate,' Carolan says. 'People are relying on it, and it's giving them inaccurate information.' Aoife McIlraith, managing director of Luminosity Digital marketing agency, says Google had almost certainly released its AI search product sooner than it wanted to. 'There's huge pressure on them. It's the first time they actually had competition in the market for search. It will definitely get better, but it's going to take some time,' McIlraith says. Google defended AI Overviews, telling The Journal that people prefer search with this feature. It said AI Overview was designed to bring people 'reliable and relevant information' from 'top web results', and included links. Advertisement Enshittification Even setting aside the incorporation of undercooked AI answers into results, Google's traditional search product does not seem to be working as well as it once did. Journalist Cory Doctorow coined the term 'enshittification ' in 2022 to describe the pattern whereby the value to users of platforms – be it Amazon, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter – gradually declines over time. Doctorow argued that platforms start by offering something good to users (like an excellent search engine), then they abuse their users to serve business customers (search results buried under ads), and then they abuse both users and business customers to serve their shareholders. Documents released in 2023 as part of a US Department of Justice antitrust case against Google gave a rare insider view of the top of the company, revealing that in 2019 there were tensions over the direction of search. The documents suggested a boardroom struggle over whether Google's search team should be more focused on the effectiveness of the product, or on growing the number of user queries (a better search engine would mean fewer queries, and therefore fewer ads viewed). In one email, the head of search complained his team was 'getting too involved with ads for the good of the product'. Google said this weekend that this executive's testimony at trial had 'contextualised' these documents and clarified the company's focus on users. 'The changes we launch to search are designed to benefit users,' Google said. 'And to be clear: the organic results you see in search are not affected by our ads systems.' Carolan says it's impossible to know exactly what has happened within Google's algorithm, but the quality filters that were once in place to keep low-quality results further down the ranking seem to be struggling to hold back the tide. Visibility on Google can be gamed using certain practices known as search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is the reason why, for example, online recipes often contain weird, boring essays above the list of ingredients. All publishers use SEO, but the quality of search results is degraded when low quality websites are able to abuse SEO to boost their Google ranking. 'Maybe investment within search engines are going more towards AI than they are towards just sustaining the core search product,' Carolan says. 'It's very hard to say because all of this is happening in very untransparent ways. Nobody gets to see how decisions are being made.' McIlraith says it's widely believed in her industry that recent changes to Google's algorithm – in particular an August 2022 update called, ironically, 'Helpful Content' – have corrupted results. She believes this is having a bigger impact in smaller markets such as Ireland, with more . websites appearing in Irish users' results, for example. 'A lot of people in my industry have been shouting about this, particularly in the past 18 months,' McIlraith says. Google said it makes thousands of changes to search every year to improve it, and it's continuously adapting to address new spam techniques. 'Our recent updates aim to connect people with content that is helpful, satisfying and original, from a diverse range of sites across the web,' it said. For what it's worth, Shrisnak doesn't use Google now, favouring DuckDuckGo, an alternative search engine based on Google that feels a lot like the Google of old. It doesn't collect user data (and is capable of correctly identifying the current government of Ireland). What happens next? Google says AI is getting us to stay where it wants us: on Google. CEO Sundar Pichai has suggested that AI encourages users to spend more time searching for answers online, growing the overall advertising market. Google says AI Overviews have increased usage by 10% for the type of queries that show overview results. Soon, Irish users are likely to see advertising integrated into AI Overview. The company is telling advertisers this will be a powerful tool, putting their ads in front of us at an important, previously inaccessible moment when we are just beginning to think about something. But AI raises existential questions for the production of content for the web as we know it, both in its ability to generate content and as it's being applied in search. In the jargon of digital marketing, the problem is known as 'zero click'. You ask Google a question and get an answer – maybe an AI-generated one – without ever having to click on a blue link. McIlraith says: 'The biggest challenge for all of my clients and the wider industry is that Google is flatly refusing to give us any data around zero click. We cannot see how much our brand is showing up in search results where no click is being attributed.' Until now, there was an unwritten contract: websites provided Google with information for free, and benefited from Google-generated traffic. This contract is broken when Google morphs into a single interface scraping the web to feed its AI in a way that negates the need to click through links to websites to find information. 'The challenge then really becomes, why would I create content?' McIlraith says. 'Why would I create content on my website just for these AIs to come along and scrape it?' Already there are challenges to ChatGPT's practices, with publishers led by the New York Times suing OpenAI over its use of copyrighted works. News/Media Alliance, the trade association representing all the biggest news publishers in the US, last month condemned AI Mode as 'the definition of theft'. 'Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue,' the alliance said. 'Now Google just takes content by force.' Google CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled about this by US tech news website The Verge last week. He said AI Mode would provide sources, adding that for the past year Google has been sending traffic to a broader base of websites and this will continue. He did not give a definitive answer when asked by whether a 45% increase in web pages over the past two years was the result of more of the web being generated by AI, stating that 'people are producing a lot of content'. Carolan speculates that in the single interface, linkless future, with the business model of web publishing broken, the risk is that the internet starts to eat itself: regurgitating AI slop rather than sustaining the production of original material. The information Google's AI Mode and ChatGPT and the rest are feeding off will then degrade. Late stage enshittification. AI search itself may improve, but these improvements will be undermined by this disintegration of the information environment. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... Our Explainer articles bring context and explanations in plain language to help make sense of complex issues. We're asking readers like you to support us so we can continue to provide helpful context to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. Learn More Support The Journal
