The Silver Miller law firm, which has been on the forefront of cryptocurrency lawsuits including the class action lawsuit against YouTube regarding BitConnect, is suing the major cell service providers AT&T and T-Mobile over their roles in facilitating sim swapping.
In August 2018 it came to light that a crime ring led by Joel Ortiz had stolen USD 5 million in cryptocurrency from over 40 victims. BitcoinNews correctly speculated at the time that the mobile carriers may be liable for the damages since ultimately they were the ones who handed over control of victim’s sim cards to the hackers.
Silver Miller asserts that T-Mobile and AT&T had holes in their security protocols and did not properly train employees, resulting in employees giving control of sim cards to thieves. Once the hackers had control over a sim card they could access financial information, allowing them to drain cryptocurrency wallets, as well as credit cards and bank accounts.
One of the clients Silver Miller is representing lost USD 621,000, and that was after AT&T supposedly increased account security after an attempted hack on the client. There are 2 clients using T-Mobile who lost USD 400,000 and USD 250,000 respectively.
Essentially, a hacker can plea for assistance with customer support, tricking the customer support into not following proper identification protocols, resulting in the loss of a client’s life savings. Silver Miller is considering additional sim swapping lawsuits against Verizon, Sprint PCS, Cricket Wireless, Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Metro PCS. The goal is to restore the client’s life savings and improve the policies of cell phone carriers to prevent further sim swapping.
It could be argued that cryptocurrency thefts via sim swapping would not happen if the victims properly stored their cryptocurrency. Bitcoin private keys, especially for large amounts of money, should only be stored in core wallets and not on mobile wallets.
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