However, account takeover is the most likely outcome. They could go through your personal information looking for any information to blackmail you with. They have your phone number, they could attempt phishing schemes, reaching out to your loved ones. Nothing like waking up in the morning just to find out you've been defrauded out of six figures! This is just an account takeover scenario though.
#Sim card hack for free service password#
Your phone may inform you that your SIM card is missing, you may get some push notifications that your e-mail password is incorrect, but the fraudster knows all of this so he does it while you are asleep. And if this all happened in the middle of the day you might notice some strange things. Delete your social media and e-mail accounts just to mess with you? Sure, why not. What does this fraudster do when they have access to all of your accounts? Whatever the they want! Drain your crypto? Check.
#Sim card hack for free service crack#
I told you that SIM Swap was a gateway hack, well in this metaphor the crack is account take over. Many of these sequences involve a password reset that operates through multi-factor authentication one time passcodes, in a mere matter of minutes they have unlocked all of your accounts and are now free to unload their reign of terror. See now that the fraudster has access to your phone and all incoming messages they can go through all of your accounts and set off account recovery sequences. But unless the fraudster is your ex-girlfriend trying to spy on your incoming texts, the situation is going to get much, much worse. But ‘Hey, here is my birthdate!' (They could have stolen a piece of mail or checked out your social media pages.) After the fraudster rattles off enough true facts the customer service rep infers that they are indeed you and dutifully ports over the number.
They will have some sort of sob story about how they need to port their number over to a new device and forgot all of their passwords.
An example:Ī fraudster will call your cell phone provider pretending to be you. More often than not a SIM Swap attack occurs with some social engineering that exploits a hole in security and either an overeager customer service worker or a mole within a telco. We've been banging the drum for SIM Swap for a long time over here at TeleSign but let's do the quick CliffsNotes version one more time.Ī SIM Swap is an unauthorized number porting. But when we discuss cybersecurity one thing is certain, a SIM Swap is the beginning of a chain that causes absolute carnage for a bevy of stakeholders. There are fallacies in each of these arguments. Similarly, in criminal justice there are certain advocates for harsh penalties for something small like shoplifting, because shoplifting will invariably lead to homicide if it is not corrected right away. Plenty of people drink socially and never progress their hedonistic ways beyond that. You've probably heard of the term ‘gateway drug.' It's a piece of escalation theory that states that someone who tries alcohol, tobacco or some other minor drug will sooner or later be addicted to crack. TeleSign to offer SIM Swap protection in US, Canada, UK, Nigeria, South Africa, France and Australia