2/07/2018

Crypto wallet was hacked by T-Mobile Phone Scam

Man loses $20k, Phone number, crypto-wallets hacked, T-Mobile US held responsible


A man from Washington who lost all of his crypto-coins has filed a suit against T-Mobile USA after the hackers were able to defraud his phone number. Even, the ‘PIN’ was ignored, for which T-Mobile has already put out an alert service.

Carlos Tapang approached the US state's western district court, and pleaded that the T-Mobile violated America's Federal Communications Act. The miscreants, in November last year, were able to get control of his phone number because of the huge lapse of security services by T-Mobile USA. Unfortunately, the strangers were able to take over his cryptocurrency wallets fraudulently. On account of this mischief, he lost thousands of dollars drained by them in digital money.

As per complaint made by Tapang, the mischief happened on November 7 last year when some unidentified person approached T-Mobile and asked the mobile company to move his (Tapang’s) number to a gadget on AT&T's network. Without verifying any details or asking for a PIN to approve the transfer of mobile number, Tapang claimed that T-Mobile is responsible for the entire security lapse. He asked the telecom co. that for what reason telco staff simply authorized the number port as requested by the miscreant. Surprisingly, AT&T assigned his mobile number to the criminals, without following the required US federal communication act.

It has been further alleged that the hackers fraudulently utilized the mobile number to reset his (Tapang’s) online cryptocurrency accounts password which was related to that number. After that, they accessed his cryptocurrency account, took a control over his wallet and moved his funds to an unidentified location.

Tapang's suit claims the stolen currency amounted to 2.875 Bit coins (approximately $20,350). The criminals converted his 1,000 OmiseGo (OMG) tokens and 19.6 Bit Connect coins into BTC illegally.

To conclude with, we must say that Tapang is not the only person whose mobile number was stolen via a falsified port-out application. In the past too, many persons have reported thefts in their wallet accounts. In order to provide assistance, T-Mobile USA has set up a website to handle these issues. Furthermore, consumers are told to set up a secure PIN to safeguard their numbers.

However, Tapang claims that T-Mob protection policy is hopeless. The telco falls short to need the PIN and permitted his number to be transferred without any verification. In this situation, the mobile network has been accused of carelessness, and for that reason, fully responsible for the hack.

The legal suit stated that T-Mobile has totally failed to implement safeguard policies regarding the conception and verification of user credentials for approved customers accessing mobile wallet accounts, thereby, leading to unfair trade practices. Moreover, T-Mob has failed to guarantee that only approved persons have such access and that customer accounts are safe and secure.

The defendants T-Mobile USA, however, did not made any comments on the legal suit.

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