Technologies

Gift card scams are growing, and we’re all paying the price

Every year, scammers trick Americans into handing over millions of dollars in gift card payments. Retailers aren’t doing much about it.

The scams start out innocently enough.

Maybe a phone call from someone who says he works for Amazon, claiming he noticed someone hacked into your account. Maybe someone who says she works for Microsoft, offering a refund for a computer security service you bought a few years ago that stopped working.

Lisa Hernandez was trying to reach Match.com, the dating site, to cancel her account when it happened to her. The 50-year-old single mother of four had signed up for the service but decided she didn’t want to stay with it.

She searched on Google for a customer service number to call. What she found instead was a fake website, built to look legitimate but with a phone number that connected her to a scammer posing as Match customer service. Kevin, the man on the other end of the line, said he could help. First, though, he told her she needed to install a program called TeamViewer, which allowed him remote control of her computer.

He then directed Hernandez to log into her bank’s website. «We’re going to directly refund you your money,» he promised and asked her to fill out a computer-generated form for her refund of $93. Instead, Kevin set his scam in motion by manipulating the code on her computer to make it look like he had deposited $9,000 into her bank account instead, effectively doubling her savings.

The only way to fix the mistake, he told her, was to buy gift cards with the extra money she’d received and give him the numbers. Then he could put the money back into Match’s bank accounts and all would be settled. «I need you to go to the store to get Target cards,» she remembers him saying. Otherwise, he’d lose his job. She did as he asked, giving him nearly $9,000 worth of gift cards.

Moments just like this happen to tens of millions of Americans every year. While it’s easy to assume most victims are elderly, surveys suggest it’s much broader. Victims are old and young, rich and poor. Some people get scammed multiple times. Some victims have family members who fight fraud for a living. It’s struck my family. Likely, it’s happened to yours, too.

When you think of computer crimes, identity theft usually comes first to mind. That’s because it cost Americans a staggering $56 billion last year, according to Javelin Strategy and Research. But it tends to feel more like an inconvenience than theft, because you usually get your money back thanks to a nearly half-century-old law designed to protect consumers from any «unauthorized» credit charges. The fees we pay help cover the losses to that fraud. But it’s different with gift cards — they have no such legal protections. When a victim shares the card number with a scammer, they’ve effectively authorized its use. Even identity fraud insurance, which would cover ID theft in the case of a data breach, often doesn’t apply when you’ve given the information willingly.

«If someone coerces you, then you’re out of luck,» said Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention programs at AARP.

It’s impossible to fathom how much money these scammers have taken. Many victims don’t report the crime to authorities, often because they’re embarrassed and quickly learn the hard truth that they’re unlikely to get their money back. So when the Federal Trade Commission counted more than $245 million in money lost to gift card scams since 2018, most experts said the actual number is likely many multiples worse than that.

«This is only the tip of the iceberg,» said John Breyault, vice president for public policy, telecommunications and fraud at the National Consumers League.

The anecdotal data suggests he’s right. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, for example, said it receives more than 2,000 complaints each day about all sorts of internet scams, from fraudulent business impersonation to fake romances to gift card scams. All told, the FBI tallied $4.2 billion in fraud losses reported by victims last year.

Some stores put up signs next to gift card racks and checkout counters warning about fraud. Others say they’re training employees to spot potential victims. But they aren’t doing much else. «The business incentive in the gift card space is for these cards to be used with as little friction as possible,» Breyault said. «They don’t want to get into the way of someone buying a gift card and buying a Coke on the way out.»

From gift to fraud

The gift card industry is already larger than the gross domestic product of all but a handful of countries. It’s still growing, too, and surveys suggest its use is pretty evenly split along racial, gender and economic lines.

By 2027, gift card spending is expected to reach $2.7 trillion — topping all but the US, China, Japan, Germany and the UK. That’s already up from $1 trillion in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged consumer spending, according to Research and Markets. And this year, as a congested global supply chain is causing a shortage of some popular gifts, more than one in five people plan to use gift cards when shopping during the holidays, according to a YouGov survey commissioned by CNET parent company Red Ventures.

Retailers love gift cards, too. They get to hold onto any money we don’t spend for years, industry experts say. And when we do use up our gift cards, we tend to buy things more expensive than the gift card can cover, a term some companies internally call «up-spend.» So retailers try to make gift cards as easy to buy as they can. You can find all manner of gift cards for all sorts of things at drug stores, convenience shops and grocery chains.

After reading the FTC’s data last year, Stokes at AARP set out to take on gift card scams. In April, the organization began a three-year program to throw its educational and marketing weight behind the problem, and for good reason. One study it commissioned found that a quarter of US adults were unsure whether it’s a sign of a scam for a business to ask for payment in gift cards, something no legitimate business would do. AARP also built up parts of its website, Fraud Watch Network, publishing articles about the scams and examples of the scripts they use, and it expanded its fraud hotline with hopes of helping victims spot a scam as it’s happening.

So far, things haven’t gone as she’d hoped. «We thought it would be an easy message,» she said. But it turns out most of the people who end up coming to AARP for help do so after they’ve been scammed.

People like Hernandez. She got in touch after she was scammed in August. Though she’s accepted that the money’s mostly gone, she can’t shake how violating the whole experience was. As a nurse in the San Francisco Bay Area, Hernandez built her career on trust. She works a second job as a caregiver too, where she’s regularly given her client’s bank card to withdraw money from an account or buy stuff from the store. «I would never think of taking from them,» Hernandez says. «I would never betray that.»

Which is maybe why she trusted Kevin, who was begging her to buy gift cards. Hernandez spent $3,500 on seven Target cards, then withdrew another $5,000 to buy more. As she gave him the card numbers, Kevin told her not to look at her bank account for a couple days. She did anyway and found that the extra money he’d manipulated the bank webpage to show in her account was gone. Instead, she had just about $500 balance left.

Kevin called her again, saying one of the $500 cards didn’t go through. When she began to ask questions, one of Kevin’s colleagues got on the phone and began yelling at her. As they kept demanding Hernandez get more gift cards, the horrible realization dawned on her. «I said, ‘You just took my money.'»

New twist

The confidence game, as some call it, has been around since ancient times. Con artists are even in the Bible where they’re referred to as false prophets, «who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.» Scammers are the reason we all bristle about snake oil, the fake cure-all elixir sold in the 18th century and 19th century, born from supposedly old Chinese medicinal techniques.

To be successful, a con artist typically needs to be charismatic, quick-witted and intelligent. After all, they have to be good at gaining people’s confidence.

«It exploits people’s trust,» Cathy Scott, a true crime author, wrote in Psychology Today. «Even the most rational people have proven susceptible to crimes of trickery.»

The internet’s anonymity and quick communication helped to supercharge fraud. Gift card scammers can come from all over the world, too. All they need is a mic and an easily downloaded phone app installed on their computer. The phone app hides their location behind a toll-free number or a seemingly local US one.

The scam that victimized Hernandez isn’t the only one out there. A scammer might pretend to be an FBI agent, calling with a warrant for your arrest. They might pose as an IRS agent threatening to cancel your Social Security number for some offense of which you’re innocent. In those schemes, the only way to stop the police supposedly coming to your door is with the help of another scammer who pretends to be a lawyer, conveniently a phone call away, who takes payment in gift cards.

Sometimes the scammers pretend to be tech support, calling to repair your printer. Or they say your internet is hacked and then get you to install screen-sharing software like TeamViewer or AnyDesk to show technical gobbledygook that they say is proof the hackers have taken over. You just need to buy security, they say, with gift cards.

«Scammers know if they make it emotional and create this sense of urgency and fear, the logical part of your brain disconnects and the fight-or-flight kicks in — which is great for protecting you, but it’s terrible at making decisions,» said Eva Velasquez, head of the nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center, and a former law enforcement investigator of economic and financial crimes.

Her team’s research found that if you can interrupt that emotional response, the logical side has a chance to kick in. That’s partly why retailers have put signs up at gift card racks, warning about potential fraud. «Have you been asked to buy gift cards to pay a fine, taxes, fees or to help someone?» one sign at a Giant grocery store in Maryland reads. «Never provide numbers to ANYONE over the phone or by email.»

Still, Velasquez said, scams of all sorts have become even more prevalent during the pandemic. «It’s been growing and growing, and the explosion over the last 18 months is unprecedented,» she said. «It’s going to take at least a decade to unwind and get to the bottom of how big a problem it is.»

Trust betrayed

One of the first things Mark told me when recounting his experience being scammed was how bad it made him feel. It had only happened a few weeks earlier, in October, and it still stung. He requested his full name be withheld to avoid embarrassment with his family.

The call from the scammers started out seemingly normal. The person calling claimed to be from Amazon, concerned about a rogue $750 purchase with his credit card.

The person on the other end of the phone claimed Amazon had already stopped the supposed charge but asked Mark to buy gift cards that they could use as bait to track down scammers. Once all the scammers were caught, Mark was told, they’d give the gift cards back.

«Dumb me, I believed that,» he said.

Mark is in his 70s and retired after a successful career as crew for some of the most memorable summer blockbuster films from the 1990s. But he says he’s not computer savvy. «I have trouble getting along on it,» he said. «I mostly use it to play puzzles and stuff.»

At first, the scammers asked Mark to buy $3,000 in gift cards from Target and Apple. If a store employee asked why he was spending so much money, the scammers told him to say the cards were gifts for a party.

Retailers have a blind spot for situations like Mark’s. The companies have sophisticated software and entire teams devoted to detecting customers who are trying to scam them. But when a customer comes in, buying gift cards, «the retailers are learning it’s very difficult to track,» said David Fletcher, senior vice president at ClearSale, which helps detect fraud at the online stores of more than 4,000 merchants, including Motorola, Under Armour and Bath & Body Works.

That’s why some retailers train employees to ask probing questions at checkout. Best Buy, in a statement, said it’s also added warning signs to gift card displays and checkout counters. Its systems flash a warning on the credit card reader screen when customers purchase gift cards above a certain limit.

But it still isn’t enough. Fletcher himself became a victim when scammers emptied a $100 gift card his mother had bought for the fishing store Bass Pro Shops. He suspects scammers took photos of the account codes on the back of cards while they were still on the rack and waited until they were activated.

«Gift cards are so hard to trace back to fraudsters,» he said.

Not that any of the questions the clerk asked Mark made any difference.

At his first stop, the teller would only let him buy a couple cards, at $500 each. «It was kind of a surprise,» he said of the limit. In retrospect, he appreciates it now.

But the scammers convinced Mark to go to more stores. Mark remembers checkout clerks asking what the cards were for a couple times. The scammers kept asking Mark for more money until he became suspicious and checked the value on the Target cards he had purchased. That’s when he learned most of the money was gone.

When Mark contacted the police, they took down his information but didn’t ask for the phone numbers the scammers called from. Experts say it’s nearly impossible to track fraudsters through their numbers anyway. Instead, the police suggested Mark contact AARP for support and also to help guide him through reporting and other things to do. His bank, from which he’d ultimately withdrawn $5,000, declined to refund his losses.

«I feel so stupid about the whole thing,» he said.

Like Hernandez, the nurse, Mark hopes that sharing his story will help people learn some of the tricks the scammers use and avoid the same mistakes he made.

While Mark said his savings are enough to cover the losses he suffered, the fraudsters made off with nearly all of Hernandez’s money. And she gave up getting a refund from Match too.

«It’s tough and embarrassing, and I feel kind of dumb,» Hernandez said, adding that she tends to keep the tough things that happen in her life to herself, though eventually she did tell some details to her kids. «I had to go and pray a lot.»

She also decided she’s going to stay away from dating for now. But she did have one last confrontation with Kevin, who promised to make it better.

Hernandez was desperate to get her money back, but she was also upset. «I don’t know how you can do this to people,» she remembers saying. Kevin asked for her address and ended the conversation saying he’d send her the money in the mail. She hoped his conscience might have changed him.

She hasn’t heard from Kevin since.

The story continues Friday, when we look at efforts to fight back at the scammers.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for Sept. 19 #565

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for Sept. 19, No. 565.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Do you drink your coffee black? If so, today’s NYT Strands puzzle might be a puzzler. If you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Pour it on.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Wow, no cow.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

NONE, CONE, RICER, SHEW, FAIR, FAIRY, DRAY, YARD, MILK, CASH, DONE, DRAM, MADAM

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

RICE, FLAX, ALMOND, CASHEW, COCONUT, MACADAMIA

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is NONDAIRYMILK. To find it, look for the N that’s four letters down on the far-left row, and wind across and down.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for Sept. 19, #831

Here are some hints and the answers for the NYT Connections puzzle for Sept. 19, #831.

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles.

Today’s NYT Connections puzzle might be tough, although I thought the blue and purple group were pretty fun, once I saw the connections. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers.

The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by following their progress, including the number of puzzles completed, win rate, number of times they nabbed a perfect score and their win streak.

Read more: Hints, Tips and Strategies to Help You Win at NYT Connections Every Time

Hints for today’s Connections groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Assess something.

Green group hint: Not feeling great about this.

Blue group hint: Hand me a Kleenex.

Purple group hint: You write on this.

Answers for today’s Connections groups

Yellow group: Evaluate.

Green group: Exhibit nervousness.

Blue group: Things that can run, annoyingly.

Purple group: Paper ____.

Read more: Wordle Cheat Sheet: Here Are the Most Popular Letters Used in English Words

What are today’s Connections answers?

The yellow words in today’s Connections

The theme is evaluate. The four answers are grade, rank, rate and score.

The green words in today’s Connections

The theme is exhibit nervousness. The four answers are blush, fidget, pace and sweat.

The blue words in today’s Connections

The theme is things that can run, annoyingly. The four answers are

The purple words in today’s Connections

The theme is paper ____. The four answers are clip, tiger, towel and trail.

Technologies

Before Updating to iOS 26, Change These 10 Settings to Make the Most of iOS 18

If you’re waiting to install Apple’s latest system update, or you’re using an older iPhone model, these settings can improve your everyday experience.

The iPhone’s latest operating system, iOS 26, is now available, but I won’t hold it against you if you want to wait for everyone else to shake out any bugs in the first version. In the meantime, there are plenty of enhancements you can make to iOS 18 if you haven’t already to make it feel faster, easier and more private.

I’ve identified 10 simple changes that can have an immediate impact on your phone’s performance. Some help reduce background battery drain, others give you more control over your privacy, and a few are just quality-of-life tweaks that make your iPhone run smoother. The best part is that anyone can do them—most take less than a minute to adjust. So if your iPhone feels a little sluggish or you just want to get the most out of it, changing these hidden settings is a great place to start.

For more on some of the features in iOS 18, learn about improvements to the overhauled Calculator app and the Mail app. And to see what’s new in iOS 26, get up to speed with this overview of new features.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Turn off categories in the Mail app

With email, everyone has their own way of dealing with the influx of messages. Traditionally, the Mail app has kept a chronological list, but that can get unwieldy if you also get scores of promotions, receipts and other types of email. The new categories feature creates virtual buckets for Primary, Transactions, Updates and Promotions, and guesses how your messages should be sorted.

If that approach doesn’t work for you, here are two things to try.

• In the event that categories are somewhat useful, but you still want a chronological view of your Inbox, swipe all the way to the right of the categories and tap All Mail.

• To turn off categories altogether, tap the three-dot menu (…) in the top-right corner, and then tap List View.

Change the default buttons on the lock screen

In real estate, location is everything, and the bottom corners of the iPhone lock screen are the prime spots, each an easy thumb press away when your device is still locked. Before iOS 18, those posts were held by the flashlight and camera buttons, with no way to change them.

In iOS 18, you can finally replace them with other buttons — or remove them entirely, a balm for folks who unknowingly activate the flashlight (believe me, there’s a better way to turn it on). You can add buttons to recognize music via Shazam, enable Dark Mode, set an alarm/timer, enable Airplane Mode, open your Wallet, send money via Tap to Cash and more.

Here’s how:

1. On the iPhone’s lock screen, touch and hold anywhere on the display until you see the Customize button. You’ll need to unlock the phone using Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode. If it opens the home screen, swipe down from the center-top of the screen (not the right edge, which brings up Control Center.

2. Tap Customize and then choose Lock Screen.

3. Remove one of the buttons by tapping the – (minus) button on the icon.

4. To replace the button with another function, tap its space (now with a + icon) and then choose the one you want on the next screen. (You can also opt to leave that space empty with no button.)

5. Repeat those steps for the other button if you want to change it.

6. Tap Done when you’re finished.

7. Tap the lock screen again to exit the customize mode.

Get important alerts using Prioritize Notifications

For iPhone models that can run Apple Intelligence, a new option introduced in iOS 18.4 is fast becoming one of my favorite AI features. Go to Settings > Notifications, and under Apple Intelligence, tap Prioritize Notifications. As new alerts come in — and some days feel like they arrive in floods — Apple Intelligence determines which ones are more likely to be important to you. For example, texts from people in your contacts could be flagged in favor of random scam messages. On that settings screen, you can enable or disable priority notifications for individual apps.

Set up some of the new tasks available on the Action button

The Action button on the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 16, iPhone 16E, iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 17 line, replaced the dedicated mute switch found on every earlier iPhone model with a configurable control. By default, it serves the same purpose — hold it to turn Silent Mode on or off — but you can configure it for other actions like opening the Camera app, performing multiple actions at once or even ordering coffee. The iOS 18.4 update added Visual Intelligence as an option for the Action button. That makes the AI technology available on the iPhone 16E, which does not include the novel new Camera Control but is now an option for any iPhone with an Action button.

In iOS 18, the Action button gets new capabilities. You can bypass Control Center and choose a control of your choice, such as opening the Remote interface for navigating Apple TV or using Shazam to identify a song.

To choose a different action for the Action button, go to Settings > Action Button. Swipe sideways to select and activate one of the available actions. For the Controls, Shortcut and Accessibility options, tap the Choose button to pick which specific action to run.

Give your home screen a radical new look

You wouldn’t think that putting icons where you want is a radical new feature, but that’s because iOS has always had a locked arrangement. Apps get added from top to bottom, left to right. You could rearrange the order in which icons appear and move them to other screens, but that was about it.

In iOS 18, apps can be positioned nearly anywhere. You no longer need to deal with a wallpaper image of your kids or pets being obscured by icons. They still adhere to a grid — Apple isn’t about to sanction anarchy — but can be placed freely.

Also, Dark mode finally applies to all of the iPhone’s home screen, with options for coloring icons and affecting the brightness of the wallpaper image. Here’s how to customize the looks.

Arrange apps: Touch and hold the home screen to enter «jiggle mode,» and then drag the icons to new positions. It will still slide them around to fill spaces, but with patience, you can move them into the spots you want.

You can also quickly turn compatible apps into widgets that display more information. Maps, for instance, can be a map of your current location with shortcut buttons to search for places or bring up a list of nearby places (such as dinner spots). Touch and hold the app icon and look for a row of resize buttons in the menu that appears. Once expanded beyond the standard icon size, you can drag the handle in the bottom-right corner of the new icon. To get it back to its single icon size you need to touch and hold again and choose the single-icon button

Set Dark mode: If you’ve ever subjected yourself to the retina blast of black text on a white background late at night in a darkened room, you will appreciate the new Dark mode option for the home and lock screens. iOS has previously included a Dark mode, where light backgrounds switch to black or dark gray, text switches to white or light gray and other interface elements are dimmed to coexist in a dark environment. That’s never been applied to the home and lock screens in any significant way — only the dock and some widgets — until iOS 18.

First, touch and hold the home screen to enter jiggle mode. Tap the Edit button in the top-left corner and choose Customize from the menu. At the bottom of the screen, choose a mode for the icons and background: Automatic, Dark or Light (I’ll get to Tinted in a moment). In Dark mode, the icons gain black backgrounds, and folders and the Dock become dark gray. (Developers have the option of making Dark mode icons for their apps. In the meantime, apps not yet optimized get a generally darker appearance.)

In Dark mode, the background image also changes. Apple’s default iOS 18 wallpaper dynamically changes from light to dark as the day progresses, or you can choose colors that offer a light and dark option. If you use a photo, its overall exposure is reduced to dim the light output.

If you want dark icons but aren’t a fan of the dimmed photo treatment, tap the sun icon in the corner of the options sheet at the bottom of the screen to toggle back to Light mode just for the background.

Tinted icons: A new and different option is to tint all of the app icons so they share the same color. In the Customize options at the bottom of the screen, choose Tinted as the icon style. You can then adjust the Hue (the slider with the color spectrum) and Luminosity (the slider with the dark to light range) to choose the color tint you prefer.

What if you want to match a color from a background image? Tap the eyedropper button and then drag the reticle to pinpoint the color you want — the border indicates the selected color.

The tint is applied not only to icons but to widgets as well. For a widget such as Photos, the images it displays show up as duotones to match the theme.

Large icons: Do the labels below each app icon seem redundant to you? Now you can remove the labels and increase the size of the icons with one setting. Open the Customize options as described above and tap the Large button.

After making any of these changes, tap anywhere on the screen to apply them and exit the Customize interface.

Change up how the Control Center looks

Control Center was once a convenient place to quickly access controls such as playback volume and Airplane mode but under iOS 18 it’s a configurable playground. You can position controls where you want, resize many to reveal more information and add new controls on multiple screens.

Swipe down from the top-right corner to reveal the Control Center (or swipe up from the bottom on the iPhone SE). To enter edit mode, touch and hold or press the + button at the top-left corner.

Just as with moving apps, drag a control to another slot on the screen to reposition it. Many of the controls also include a bottom-right handle that can resize the control — in most cases, it reveals the name of the control and its current status (such as Flashlight Off).

Control Center also now spans multiple screens. Swipe up to view controls for media currently playing, Home controls for smart lights and appliances and a page dedicated to the communication options that appear when you long-press the Connectivity block containing Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Cellular and others. Look closely and you’ll see that those screens are actually individual controls expanded to occupy the entire Control Center area.

You can rearrange the order of those screens by moving their controls. Suppose you want Home controls to be the first swipe instead of Now Playing: In the editing mode, drag the large Home control up to the previous screen (Now Playing will shift to the right to make room).

To remove controls, tap the – (minus) button that appears. You can also add other controls: Tap Add a Control and scroll through the available options ranging from starting a Screen Recording to a host of accessibility options.

Read more: All the new controls you can add to Control Center

Lock or hide any of your sensitive apps

Our phones carry some of our most sensitive data and yet it’s not uncommon to hand a phone to a friend to view photos or look up something online. That doesn’t mean they’re going to snoop but it doesn’t not mean they might be more curious than you’re comfortable with. For data you want to ensure stays out of sight or to add a layer of protection in front of sensitive information, iOS 18 adds the ability to lock and hide apps.

For example, let’s say you keep an ongoing set of lists of gift ideas for family members in the Notes app. You can lock individual notes but that requires a separate step. Maybe a few ideas were made as individual quick notes or drawings. Instead of micromanaging access, you can lock the entire Notes app by doing the following:

Touch and hold the app icon you want to lock and choose Require Face ID or Require Touch ID (or Require Passcode if Face ID or Touch ID are not enabled) from the menu that appears. Confirm your choice by tapping Require Face ID (or similar) in the next dialog.

To remove the authentication step, touch and hold the app and choose Don’t Require Face ID (or similar).

Nothing outwardly indicates that an app is locked — you’ll find out when you try to open it. There’s one more level of app security available, which is to hide apps in a special locked folder. Touch and hold the app and choose Require Face ID and then tap Hide and Require Face ID in the dialog. Confirm the action by tapping Hide App on the next screen.

The app disappears from the home screen and gets slotted into a Hidden folder at the bottom of the App Library (swipe left beyond your last home screen to view the App Library). To access apps there, tap the Hidden folder and authenticate with Face ID.

iOS 18 imposes some limitations on hidden apps. Some, such as many of the built-in ones like Notes or Reminders, can only be locked and cannot be hidden at all. Also, the Hidden folder locks itself when you launch an app or swipe away from the App Library.

Turn off Loop Videos in the Photos app

Many apps have implemented a small but annoying (to me) feature, and now Photos under iOS 18 has it too: Videos automatically replay when you watch them until you tap the Pause button. That can be fun once or twice, or when viewing short clips. I’m not a fan of having to take action to make them stop each time.

Now I can take action once. Go to Settings > Photos, scroll down until you see Loop Videos and turn the option off. A video will play on its own but then stop at the end as it should.

If you’d rather the video didn’t play at all until you tap the Play button, also turn off Auto-Play Motion in the same Settings screen.

Adjust the view of your calendar

Big new features like locking and hiding apps are great additions but so are the tiny changes that you encounter every day. The Calendar app includes two new ways to view your schedule.

In iOS 18, when you’re in the Month view in portrait orientation, pinch with two fingers to view more or fewer details. As you «zoom in,» individual events appear as colored bars and then as labeled events with times, all while keeping the monthly grid of days and weeks.

The Day view, which breaks down your day hour by hour, now has a new Multi Day view that shows two consecutive days to give you context for what’s coming without turning the phone into landscape orientation and viewing the Week view. Tap the View button at the top of the Single Day view and choose Multi Day from the popup menu.

Improve movie and TV show dialogue in the TV app

Trouble hearing dialogue in movies and television shows isn’t a new problem — for example, Apple TV has had a feature for a while where you can ask Siri, «What did she say?» and it will automatically back up a few seconds, turn on subtitles and replay that section of the video. You can even buy soundbars that can overcome muffled TV speech. There are a lot of reasons it’s harder to hear dialogue but the TV app in iOS 18 includes a high-tech workaround to make dialog easier to discern.

While you’re watching a video in the TV app, tap the More (…) button and then expand the Audio heading in the menu that appears; if the phone is in horizontal orientation, tap the Audio Adjustments button. Tap Enhance Dialogue and choose Enhance or Boost. They each dampen background noise and raise the dialogue’s audio.

These are just a few selected features and changes in iOS 18. Check out our broader coverage of Apple Intelligence, more impressions of the system after using it for months and how these all work together with the iPhone 16 models.