About Impersonation Risk Detection
Impersonation Risk Detection can help protect you from scams by detecting suspicious activity in real time.
What is Impersonation Risk Detection?
Impersonation Risk Detection helps protect against active social engineering scams. In these scams, an attacker may pose as a bank, government agency or someone you trust to pressure or guide you into making a payment or changing your account details. Traditional security measures like two-factor authentication can’t always detect this kind of scam. That’s because you’re taking the action, even though you’ve been tricked or pressured.
Impersonation Risk Detection analyses information about your device and Apple Account to help detect signs of an active scam. Based on this analysis, it returns a risk level to the app. The app receives only the risk level, not the underlying information used to generate it.
The app decides what to do next. For example, it may ask you to verify your identity, add a delay or show a warning.
Impersonation Risk Detection is available starting with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27. It’s available only in apps that support it.
Find out how to recognise and avoid social engineering scams
How Impersonation Risk Detection works
When you use a supported app, it can request a risk assessment when you take actions that may be especially risky during a scam. Risky actions may include making a payment or changing critical security information for your account, such as your password.
Based on analysis of your device and Apple Account, Impersonation Risk Detection returns one of these risk levels:
Unknown: No evidence of suspicious activity was detected. This doesn’t mean that the action was confirmed as safe.
Medium: Some signs of suspicious activity were detected.
High: Significant signs of suspicious activity were detected.
The app uses this risk level to decide what action to take. Apple doesn’t determine or control the action that the app takes.
Turn on Impersonation Risk Detection
Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
Tap Privacy & Security, then scroll down and tap Impersonation Risk Detection.
Turn on Share with App Developers. To turn this feature on, you may need to sign in to the App Store with your Apple Account.
If someone directs you to turn this feature off, you may be the victim of a scam. To help protect you, changes to this setting may take up to 24 hours to take effect.
Manage Impersonation Risk Detection for individual apps
In Impersonation Risk Detection settings, you can see which apps have requested a risk assessment and why, and adjust their access.
Under Recent Activity, find which apps have requested a risk assessment.
Under Reasons for Access, review the actions that prompted the request.
To turn off access for an individual app, tap it and turn off the toggle for that app.
Changes to the setting for individual apps may take up to 24 hours to take effect.
Impersonation Risk Detection and privacy
Apple built Impersonation Risk Detection with privacy at its foundation.
Apple analyses interaction patterns, timing, context and basic sensor data to generate the risk level. This information is analysed on-device, so Apple never receives the data used to generate the risk level.
Apple never analyses the content of your Photos, Messages or Mail.
Apple learns the type of action you attempted in the app when the app requests the risk assessment.
Apps receive only the risk level, not the underlying information used to generate it.
In Settings, you can see which apps have requested Impersonation Risk Detection and review the actions that triggered each request.