A TikToker is encouraging Optus customers to delete the app off their devices after a disturbing thing happened with her partner’s phone.
Sydney woman Tahlia (@tahliaskyzzz) posted the short warning to TikTok two days ago.
“If you are a customer with Optus, go on your phone, delete the Optus app right now. We are currently at the police station because his phone was being remotely accessed,” she says, indicating her partner standing behind her.
“We were watching someone that was not one of us using a computer mouse to navigate his phone and open location services, weather apps that show current location, all sorts of stuff.”
She adds “they” can get access to bank accounts and other personal information.
“Optus knows of this and does not want to warn their customers,” she claims.
In a follow-up video, Tahlia says they can’t prove “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the phone was hacked via the Optus app, but lists several reasons why they believed it was.
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“It stopped with getting rid of the Optus app,” she says. “He’s done a factory reset on his phone then restored it to everything but Optus and it hasn’t happened again.”
In a third update, Tahlia says the couple noticed something was amiss when the phone began lighting up without a notification, as though someone was pressing the home button, and the biometrics for facial recognition was attempting to register.
“So somebody was triggering that to happen,” she says. “Someone then opened the weather app and went to live location and was refreshing that, over and over again, scrolling through the weather app looking at the future forecast for our area.”
When the pair locked the phone again, the biometrics kept popping up.
“I’m starting to get very suspicions because someone is in control of this phone,” Tahlia says. “So I put the phone down on the desk unlocked and I watched.”
That’s when Tahlia says she saw the computer mouse navigating the screen. When the phone was locked again, they noticed someone trying to guess the passcode using numbers that correspond with her partner’s name on the alphanumeric keypad.
Users are wary after Optus was hacked in September, breaching the data of over 10 million current and former customers.
Fallout from the hack still continues, with Vic Roads introducing new security measures to all Victorian driver licenses, and REA Group investors being urged to vote against the re-election of Optus chief executive Kelly Bayer Rosmarin to the property giant’s board of directors.
