Posted on 08/15/2017 1:28:24 PM PDT by Sans-Culotte
I am embarrassed to post this, my first vanity after being registered lo, these many years.
Last week, one of my credit card accounts was hacked. I received an email verifying that my login was changed, and to report it if I had not made those changes. I had not done so, and immediately called the credit card company. Apparently, someone posing as me had tried to logon, and requested to reset the password. they then changed my adress to one in Miami, FL. (this is where it gets interesting). The card company said they texted a code to my mobile phone, and the code was then used to verify that it was me. I had not received a text from them that day. At the time all this was going on, I did receive a text from a number I didn't recognize. The text consisted of a period. No words, just a period. I believe my phone was hacked, and the the hacker intercepted the text the card company sent. The "." that I received was somehow involved in the hack. The credit card company suggested that the hacker had managed to forward my texts to his phone. The phone number comes up as a Miami, FL #
I called T-Mobile to report the hack. They seemed incredulous and denied that my phone can have been hacked in the way I described.
I got a call a couple of days later from another credit card company that wanted to verify that I had opened a new account (which I of course, had not). They would not tell me the address of the hacker, but confirmed it was a Miami, FL address.
I have since registered with the FTC as an identity theft victim, and with one of the 3 credit reporting agencies. Does anyone who had gone through this have any advice as to what else I should do? I did a factory reset on my Samsung Galaxy S4, but I'm frankly afraid to use it and keep it on airplane mode now and just carry it in case I need to make an emergency call. I am inclined to leave T Mobile and find a carrier who at least believes phones can be hacked. Are iPhones harder to hack?
Credit freezes on all three credit agencies.
Get a pin for filing taxes.
Report incident to police and get a copy of the report.
Monitor your credit reports.
I don't think I've ever done any banking on the phone. However, I did have a couple of email accounts on it. The only purchases I made were via the Google Play store for apps. I guess he figured out my email address and then started trying to login to some accounts knowing that he would be texted the security code if he got a hit. I have read that apps on the Play store can have malicious worms and trojans attached that no one at Google scans for.
I forgot to add in my original post that I did report this to mt local police dept.
T Mobile did cancel "short code texts" on my phone, but that is all they have done.
I have been using my home land line or work land line to make calls since this happened.
Once they determined that I was hacked, they would tell me nothing else about the Miami address. I provided the phone # to the police department when I reported it to them.
sign up with life lock don’t for everything to get cleared up. Have them place a fraud alert for you with the credit rating agencies, they will do it for all of them so you won’t have to hunt up the phone numbers & call them yourself, Life lock will do it for you. be aware though that when you place a fraud alert on your credit you will have to prove who you are prior to opening any new accounts or applying for any new credit. File a report the with law enforcement, it sounds like this may also be wire fraud in addition to identity theft.
Mine happened about 15 years ago. Put in a address change with the post office and they didn’t bother to confirm. You’ve started on the right steps now:
1) file a police report - they won’t do anything but it needs to be done. Neither the police or postmaster general did anything for me despite knowing the forwarding address.
2) File with all 3 credit agencies. Request a lock on your credit requiring personal authorization for any new credit.
3) contact all of your cards and report the id theft - have them issue new debit, credit, atm, etc
4) For any financial accounts that you once accessed on your phone use another means to change all your passwords and log ons.
5) Request credit reports from all 3 agencies.
6) See if your bank has some id theft assistance often they do and can provide additional assistance maybe even funds for changing phone numbers and such.
On the phone side I’m not sure what to offer - that one is beyond me. I’d recommend requesting a new number though I know it’s a pain.
There are also lists you can find on the internet for additional info but that covers most I think.
A more likely scenario is your email bound to the account was hacked and you used a similar or same password across your accounts.
I hope you immediately blocked your card and applied for another. Mine got cloned on most likely a gasoline pump two weeks ago. The Visa lady called me within an hour or so of the attempted use of my number. Several large charges wee denied at Wal Mart. I blocked the card right then and am still waiting for the replacement but nobody is running up my charges. I figured it was a gas pump because the gas pumps only have magnetic strips reader and at WM if your card has a chip the machine won’t read chips. The bad charges were denied so I think they only had the strip info. I went back to the gas station which I had only stopped at that once and checked the seals on the pumps. All of them were broken so I suspect the skimmer(s) are an inside job involving an employee. I should have checked the seals when I stopped for gas.
The original credit card company canceled the two cards I had with them and issued new ones.
I'm wondering if you use any apps on the phone like Outlook, Facebook Messenger, etc...on my phone, unless I disable it, text messages go to my outlook account, as well as the normal sms...and who knows how secure that is or isn't.
Other than that, it looks like somebody is behind your lines and feasting on your supply trains. If you can think of it, freeze it and change the password, etc.
Good Luck!
any thing can be hacked,
change all your passwords
create a new email address that you only use for online financial transactions.
reset your phone to factory just to be safe.
get an antivirus program for your phone Norton does android and apple and owns lifelock
one more thing if you don’t spend the $ on lifelock investigate getting a pin for the IRS
My wife’s iphone has been hacked several times. Face Book was one of the culprits, others we don’t know how
I worry about the gas station skimmers. How can you tell? Thank you.
never use ekectronic banking .
deactivate any debit cards
Did you return any odd group texts or call me immediately voice mail calls and return them in the past few months ?
call the miami police department. they *may* look in to it further. While they won’t tell you where you live (the damn credit card company that won’t tell you the address) cops tend to be able to get that information.
Yes, that card company is hiding the theifs info from YOU.
cancel that card.
I locked my credit files on all three of the major credit reporting agencies and I don’t have to worry about identity theft.
I don’t use debt to finance my life so it’s not like I was going to use credit anyway.
I like the idea of checking the seal to see if it has been broken.
Last weekend I went to my bank's ATM located at a Murphy Express. I didn't like the odd look of the card reader (it stuck way out instead of flush with the front panel) so bypassed it and went a few miles further to the ATM at the bank.
My wife got scammed a couple years ago in a way that was mission impossible very-lite.
FedEx showed up with a package addressed to her from a tech retailer. Odd but not unusual. Later the box was opened and there was a new Go Pro.
We started the anti-fraud routine and seemed to have things under control.
In the meantime over the next couple of days FedEx would roll by to pick up the package several times. Each time no one was home except on one attempt. My wife got a picture of the label.
I have never seen a FedEx label that had the contents listed on it. It said Go Pro in a corner. The destination was some phony tech company in Miami. We were in the process of turning the camera back in to the seller and it stayed here.
The return form never arrived. I contacted the retailer and asked when I should see it. It was e-mailed out during the initial contact. I couldn’t get the address but got one sent to me.
It had pre-paid shipping but I paid for my own UPS just in case. The camera got back and it was over.
I ran the Miami address and found a typical suburban neighborhood.
My wife was later contacted by the company fraud squad and apparently there was a little old lady that was being driven crazy by FedEx constantly trying to pick up a package.
I called FedEx and they wouldn’t tell me anything.
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