Came in here to say this. A friend and I wrote our theses 24 years ago, and made frequent backups and backups of our backups. Hard drives fail, laptops get dropped/stolen - and 24 years ago, Zip disks/drives were notorious for frequent failures. Can’t think of a good reason not to have backups of all of one’s precious files, either in the cloud or on a physically isolated/air-gapped drive.
Security through obscurity? Download dozens of apps, even if you don’t use them. Create a few folders, put several apps in each folder. Put a couple of folders in each folder. Bury your banking app(s) in one of those subsubfolders. When robbed, tell perps you don’t have banking apps because of assholes like them. They can look through your phone, but if you’ve buried the apps well enough, they won’t find them in the few minutes they’re willing to spend looking.
Barring that, the usual advice applies: pay attention to your surroundings and put some thought into when/where you wander around in public.
FWIW, the OP’s story is literally a “friend of a friend” story and sounds more like urban legend. Financial transactions can definitely be tracked down, whether they’re through a conventional bank or through PayPal. The latter will definitely claw your money back for you, and the former should be relatively cooperative as well.
Apart from, you know, the friends who were purportedly robbed all being able to visually ID the guy.
Samsung phones (at least some of them) have a “secure folder” feature, where apps and files can be put in a locked partition, so they can only be accessed after opening the secure area. That won’t prevent a robber from forcing you to open it and use the apps in there, but it will prevent the robber from finding any banking apps, even if they search for them.
Even if you leave your phone at home, don’t install banking apps, or don’t even own a phone, you’re still vulnerable to having money extracted from you bank account by somebody with a gun:
Force you to reveal your pin (go ahead and lie, I know where you live)
Take you to an ATM
Steal your check book
Force you to login on the robber’s device and transfer money
Ransom
Extortion
Sure, many of those are much more involved than making somebody open up Venmo, but the ease of using apps to transfer money is exactly why it is popular.
I’m with you, Crane. My $42 Walmart flip phone works for me. It’s voice only. I don’t have a data plan on it. All the really important stuff is done on my home PC.
In response to the OP. one can obtain protection by using the phone for it’s primary function of communication and the personal computer for it’s application as an information management system.
Of course, but that has risk. Just as using a single computer has risk. The OP question was 'how to avoid risk;. The answer is diversity or just accept the risk.
His question is how to use your phone as a mobile computer while still saying safe. Your answer is like if he asked “How do I stay safe while driving a car” and you answered “Don’t drive.”
There is a lot of info on my phone, but the specific situation cited wouldn’t apply to me – because I’m literally not the one that manages my money, so I have no banking access on my smartphone. If some armed robber tries to force me to transfer money, I’d be no more or less vulnerable than @Crane not having a smartphone at all.
How often does this actually happen? I mean the odds of someone doing that to me is practically zero. Maybe if I were rich and well-known the odds could be higher.