Hoax Attempts To Make Apple Users Reformat Their Macs For Bitcoin Mining Feature

If you learn anything from the Internet, it’s that you shouldn’t take much of what’s on it serious. There are some people out there who enjoy watching the world burn, which is exactly what we saw when Internet pranksters released instructions to “unlock” the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility option or an option in iOS 7 that magically makes your iPhone waterproof. It looks like owners of Apple products have yet another bogus “tip” to stay on alert over, this time, it’s in regards to their Macs.

The latest hoax is betting on the growing popularity of Bitcoin to help destroy the Macs of greedy users who are looking to make a quick buck. The image you see above comes from 4chan’s image board, which claims Apple has included a piece of software that is able to mine Bitcoin currency on all Macs since 2009.

The hoax instructs Mac owners to open Terminal to input a simple command in order to unlock this “feature.” The “sudo rm -rf/*” command in the image is a command in Terminal that reformats the Mac owner’s hard drive.

In case we had to tell you, we encourage you not to attempt this Terminal code in any way. Well – that is unless you actually want to reformat your hard drive, then go nuts.

Daniel Perez
Categories: Apple, Computers
Tags: bitcoin, Mac (Apple)