Scam protection is one of the major security issues and sim swap scam is among the elite scams cryptocurrency and other digital users often face.
Sim swap scam is the latest king of scam where identity is stolen to steal bank and cryptocurrency details.
How sim swap works?
A sim swap scam enables fraudsters to steal your phone number, with which the individual can flush out your bank accounts, take your email, hack your social media accounts and delete your important data.
Criminals can do this because various companies send their users text messages to perform verification.
Identity fraud is being actively noticed due to the recent thefts of crypto assets, and attacks on people of high profile.
The Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, briefly lost possession of his personal Twitter profile.
Avivah Litan is a security expert who’d rather have her Social Security number (SSN) endangered than lose possession of her mobile phone number.
Litan believes that a lot of her assets are protected by access to her phone number. Users can not prevent their phone numbers from being compromised, only their carriers can.
Criminals tend to bribe and blackmail employees of mobile phone carriers, and sometimes they are the employees themselves.
The scammers use stolen data, which is either obtained from the dark web or social media, to identify themselves as you. Then they pretend that they wish to change carriers or SIM cards, which allows them to fool mobile phone carriers into transferring control to the phones that they possess.
Another security expert named Bob Sullivan has said that the process of persuading your mobile phone carrier to figure out the problem, and getting them to put a stop to it, can be tricky as well.
He implied that the process involves you striving to seek help from your carrier and being stuck in voicemail for hours, while the scammer flushes your accounts.
Mobile phone companies claim that they are working to solve the problem. Their solutions involve making identity theft a lot more difficult, but these solutions may also be a hassle for users who lost their phones and are seeking to transfer their SIM cards.
How to prevent sim swap scam?
Although not completely sim swap scam proof but users can lessen the chances of having their mobile phone numbers stolen.
You can request your mobile phone company to assign a unique identity to your account, which will be asked for whenever your number is being transferred to another SIM card, the very origin of the name sim swap scam.
The options of getting your security codes via a landline or different authentication applications can also be used to improve your authentication process.
If your mobile phone services suddenly stop working, where you can not call or send texts, there is a possibility that your phone number is hijacked and you are a victim of sim swap scam.
If this happens, instead of assuming that it may be a temporary fault, head over to your carrier and report the issue as soon as you can.
You can consider calling your mobile phone carrier using Skype and other platforms for Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP).
If you are facing such a situation once you’re sure about the fraud, you should immediately:
- Report it to your bank accounts
- Change the credentials of all your accounts that are directly or indirectly linked to your financial accounts
- Freeze your assets
- Report the issue to the police or other concerned authorities
The key is to do everything as quick as you can since criminals tend to steal your digital assets within minutes.
