On New Year’s Day 2021, a burglar broke into my house, destroyed the house, and ran off with various items. One of them was my iPad Pro, which could have allowed the thief to access my Apple Pay information if they got past the lock screen. Fortunately, Apple makes it easy to remotely delete your payment information from any device.
Remove Apple Pay cards in the ‘Find my ‘ app
The Find My app can help you locate a lost or stolen Apple device, or you can use the app to remotely delete your Apple Pay data. You must either use a secondary Apple device registered with your Apple ID or the iCloud web app.
- Open the Find My app on an Apple device or go to iCloud.com/find and sign in with your Apple ID.
- Select your lost device from the list.
- Scroll down and activate Mark as lost.
- Follow the onscreen instructions to set a lock PIN for your device. Make sure to write this down somewhere safe as you will need it to unlock your device if it is found.
- Locking your device in this way will automatically delete all saved payment information
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This is the method I used to delete my Apple Pay data from my stolen iPad Pro. Unfortunately, I never got the iPad back, but if you are lucky enough to get your lost iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch back, you can easily unlock it with the PIN you created in step 4.
Remove Apple Pay cards from the Apple ID website
Again, using the Find My app is the best option for dealing with a lost or stolen Apple device. However, like MakeUseOf points out, you can also use the Apple ID website to delete your Apple Pay information from a specific device at any time without putting it into “Lost Mode”.
- In a web browser, open it Apple ID homepage and sign in with your Apple ID.
- Find and select the device you want to erase from the list on your Apple ID account page.
- Select Remove card.
- Click “Remove” to confirm and remove that card from your device.
- Repeat for any additional cards or devices.