Not sure if this is the right place for this, but thought it may be a useful piece of information for people to have. Sunday evening I received a text message from Verizon wireless asking me to rate my experience with the customer care agent I spoke with. The problem here is that neither I or my wife had called Verizon or spoke to them about anything. I called them, and after 25 minutes on hold, was told that I called, and asked for my phone number to be ported to another carrier, and that Verizon no longer had control of my number. My cell phone no longer had service outside of my home wifi, and they couldn't, or wouldn't, provide me any additional information about this phone call I supposedly made to them. I was finally directed to the fraud department and after a battery of questions they informed me I had been the victim of a "port out scam" and that my identity had been stolen. I had to file a police report and wait a couple days for them to get number back from the other carrier. The other carrier they wouldn't name, only said it was a smaller carrier like boost ect who rents time on the t mobile network. Tuesday evening I received a call from the credit union alerting me someone called, said they were me, and tried to connect my debit card to apple pay. Lucky for us the bank didn't honor this request. So we end up closing all of our accounts, opening new ones, getting all new cards, the whole nine. Changing all passwords to everything, it's a real pain in the ass. Today Verizon informed me that they had got my number back, and everything was good. They still couldn't tell me how this person fooled them into giving them my account number and them allowing the fraudster to steal my number. Apparently the scam is to get your phone number, then use it to get all of the two factor authentication messages and use them to change your bank passwords and wire out all of your money. I was completely unaware that someone could steal my phone number. The bank informed is to use our emails instead of od our phone numbers to receive the two factor verification messages. Just a heads up to everyone this is apparently a fraud that is growing in popularity. I was told we were lucky, as no actual money was taken, but the bank manager said that last week this exact thing happened to someone else, and they cleaned out her whole account, close to 20k in a matter of minutes. We've been conditioned to believe that everything we connect to our phone number is safe, and maybe it used to be, but it isn't the case anymore. Anyway just a heads up, stay safe people.
Submitted October 02, 2019 at 06:45PM by mojothor https://ift.tt/2nXpofR
