SIM SWAPPING – Stealing Your Life

Criminals look for any way that they can gain access to your financial accounts to take your money. One method that they use is SIM Swapping.

A SIM card (Subscriber Identity Module) is a small circuit card that resides in your cell phone that identifies that phone as belonging to you. SIM cards can be removeable with the ability to be transferred between cell phones, or your phone can have an ESIM that is code embedded in your cell phone that identifies your phone as belonging to you.

If a criminal can swap SIMs to their phone, then they can impersonate you and break into your accounts.

A criminal who conducts a SIM swap also conducts two scams.

1.      They take personal information that they have gathered about you from purchased data from data breaches, gathered from a phishing campaign, or collecting sensitive information that you posted on social media to convince the phone carrier to give them a new SIM with your phone number.

2.      On successfully acquiring a SIM in your name, the criminal will try to break into one of your accounts. If the account has text based multifactor authentication (MFA) they can receive the code that your account sends out to help break into your account.

Indications that you have been a victim of SIM swapping include,

·         You cannot make or receives calls or texts.

·         An online account is locked because of suspected unauthorized access.

·         You receive alerts that someone is attempting to access an account, and you do not recognize the activity.

If you are victimized with a SIM swap, take action:

·         Contact your mobile carrier immediately.

·         Contact you bank and other financial services.

·         Disable MFA, change account(s) password(s), then enable MFA again.

·         Monitor financial accounts

·         Report to

o   The FBI IC3- https://www.ic3.gov/

o   FTC- https://www.identitytheft.gov/

You can take action to discourage SIM Swapping by

·         Set a Pin for your smartphone.

·         Use strong and unique passwords for all of your accounts.

·         DON’T POST EVERYTHING ON SOCIAL MEDIA.

·         Use non-SMS MFA. Instead use MFA with an authenticator app such as Microsoft Authenticator or Google Authenticator.

 

 

Associated Press:

https://apnews.com/article/sim-swapping-protections-tech-tip-e05ac6b894312041a5c1e4333a28df2a

 

FBI:

https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/lasvegas/news/press-releases/fbi-las-vegas-federal-fact-friday-sim-card-swapping

 

National Cybersecurity Alliance:

https://staysafeonline.org/resources/sim-card-swap-scams/

 

Federal Communications Commission:

https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/cell-phone-fraud