Hello,
I'm trying to get out of the situation I described in the title. Essentially, there was a burglary and they took my passport and most my paperwork and wound up doing a SIM swap hack via the local carrier store. They also did a bunch of bank stuff and counterfeit check stuff, but that's a whole other beast.
With the swap hack, they had my phone line overnight until I could sort things out. Ever since then, my phone has felt... odd. Apps appearing and disappearing, settings changing, settings categories being deleted, podcasts playing from random apps via their ads, pretty sure some calls are getting rerouted etc. Lots of weird unexplained phenomena, but no real smoking gun I could show to people.
Then I started noticing some MDM and MCM stuff floating around my phone and upon doing some research, I'm pretty confident that I'm being Managed. My desktop and laptop are having similar issues. Whenever I reformat my laptop, it gives it a default "desktop-xxxyyy" name, and my desktop thinks it's a tablet half the time, screen dimensions are all clipped with no way to adjust, insane amounts of background processes, unable to edit or save anything anywhere at all except the My Pictures/Documents folders, etc.
I have more proof I could go on and on about, but if we could just assume for the sake of argument that I am being managed by hostile agents, I'd like to liberate my phone at least for now.
We got rid of the last phone line and traded in for an S22, but I'm getting the same issues popping up. I'm guessing because I'm still on the same carrier account....
Are there any steps I can take to get this new device back to normal? How was it so quickly corrupted? I made a new Google account on the spot when I opened it, had the old phone completely shut down, accounts logged out, Sim card removed etc. I even opened the new phone in the middle of a field with nothing around. And yet it immediately downloaded all the normal bloatware as well as Google Partner Setup, some Google Translate app that had Korean font in the title, etc...
Is Samsung Knox perhaps involved? Some Google APIs or some exploit I'm not thinking of? Anyone seen something like this before?
Thank you!
I'm trying to get out of the situation I described in the title. Essentially, there was a burglary and they took my passport and most my paperwork and wound up doing a SIM swap hack via the local carrier store. They also did a bunch of bank stuff and counterfeit check stuff, but that's a whole other beast.
With the swap hack, they had my phone line overnight until I could sort things out. Ever since then, my phone has felt... odd. Apps appearing and disappearing, settings changing, settings categories being deleted, podcasts playing from random apps via their ads, pretty sure some calls are getting rerouted etc. Lots of weird unexplained phenomena, but no real smoking gun I could show to people.
Then I started noticing some MDM and MCM stuff floating around my phone and upon doing some research, I'm pretty confident that I'm being Managed. My desktop and laptop are having similar issues. Whenever I reformat my laptop, it gives it a default "desktop-xxxyyy" name, and my desktop thinks it's a tablet half the time, screen dimensions are all clipped with no way to adjust, insane amounts of background processes, unable to edit or save anything anywhere at all except the My Pictures/Documents folders, etc.
I have more proof I could go on and on about, but if we could just assume for the sake of argument that I am being managed by hostile agents, I'd like to liberate my phone at least for now.
We got rid of the last phone line and traded in for an S22, but I'm getting the same issues popping up. I'm guessing because I'm still on the same carrier account....
Are there any steps I can take to get this new device back to normal? How was it so quickly corrupted? I made a new Google account on the spot when I opened it, had the old phone completely shut down, accounts logged out, Sim card removed etc. I even opened the new phone in the middle of a field with nothing around. And yet it immediately downloaded all the normal bloatware as well as Google Partner Setup, some Google Translate app that had Korean font in the title, etc...
Is Samsung Knox perhaps involved? Some Google APIs or some exploit I'm not thinking of? Anyone seen something like this before?
Thank you!
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