Who Owns Your Wireless Service? Crooks Do.
Summary: A Pakistani man was arrested and extradited to the United States on charges of bribing numerous AT&T call-center employees to install malicious software and unauthorized hardware, a scheme that removed millions of phones from AT&T service or payment plans and allegedly paid insiders hundreds of thousands of dollars. Separately, a federal judge in New York rejected AT&T's request to dismiss a $224 million lawsuit over a SIM-swapping incident that led to $24 million in stolen cryptocurrency, and the EFF filed a class action to stop AT&T and two location aggregators from giving bounty hunters, car dealerships, landlords and stalkers access to customers' real-time locations.
What's compelling: The $24 million in stolen cryptocurrency tied to a single SIM-swap case, and the alleged $80 million attributed to one 21-year-old defendant, show that control of a phone number is now a direct path to eight-figure losses.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Fraud & Scams
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