google pixel: Google Pixel phones sent for servicing used to steal private pics, hijack accounts: Report – Times of India

In a shocking turn of events over the week, two Google Pixel owners publicly claimed that the Pixel phones they had sent back to Google for warranty service and replacement were used to steal private pictures and hijack their accounts, as per a report by Android Police. Of the two reports, one came on Reddit on r/legaladvice subreddit on December 1 and the other one came from game designer and New York Times bestselling author Jane McGonigal who posted about a similar incident on Twitter on December 4, 2021.
To cut a long story short, the Reddit report said that the damaged Pixel phone of the post creators’ wife was sent to Google for an RMA. The phone couldn’t be powered on and there was no lock screen password or pin on it before it was sent for the repairs. After a month or so after the phone was sent, someone posted the private pics (“nudes”) of the post author and his wife on her social media accounts, pics that were allegedly pilfered from the phone sent for the repair. Moreover, $5 was stolen from the author’s PayPal account, perhaps just for testing purposes and he was also locked from his Google account. When traced, the unauthorised logins were tracked down to Texas, with the location data pointing out the Google repair building only, which led to the post author filing a police report eventually.
Author Jane McGonigal also joined some days later about having a similar experience with Google when her Pixel reportedly “disappeared” after the delivery.
In this case, the phone McGonigal sent to Texas only for repair reportedly “disappeared” after delivery, and she’d been trying to get help from the company to find it. As per the report, she “tried to erase and lock the device remotely through Google’s Find My Device tool, but those attempts apparently weren’t successful.”
She said in a tweet on December 4 that “As has happened with others, last night someone used it to log into my gmail, Drive, photos backup email account, dropbox, and I can see from activity logs they opened a bunch of selfies hoping to find nudes” Here’s the tweet.

Those involved also tried to hide her security messages, deleting them and marking them as spam so that she would have lesser chances of being alerted to suspicious activity, adds the report.