My phone, my credit card, my hacker, and me

[searcher]

My phone, my credit card, my hacker, and me​

Verizon, Chase, the police — they were all useless when my identity got hacked. Then Psycho Bunny came to the rescue.

It was a Friday in July when I first noticed something seemed off. I was spending some time with my family on a gorgeous summer day, swimming and drinking beer and ignoring my phone as much as possible. When I finally checked my notifications, I had two alerts from Verizon. Both contained authorization codes — the kind of security measure they take when you make changes to your account. There was also a receipt from Verizon for $0 and a message thanking me for activating my new device.

More:

A hacker ripped me off for $10,000. The scam turned out to be brilliant — and terrifying.

Verizon, Chase, and the police were all useless when my identity got hacked. Then Psycho Bunny came to the rescue.

www.businessinsider.com

 

[Someone_else]

TL;DR
Postal workers stole her credit card in transit. Then they forged an ID card with her name. Then another took the ID and her phone number to the Verizon store and claimed the old phone was damaged and unusable, and asked to activate her "old" one. The Verizon clerk did this and thief now has a phone that will impersonate the victim. Victim's' phone is deactivated. Now thief goes on a spending spree, and when the credit card company sends fraud alerts, thief approves them with the phone.

Victim has great difficulty getting this resolved with Verizon and Chase, until a customer rep retrieves a recording of the thief and notes it is nothing like the victim.

 

[nickndfl]

Do not do any banking via cell phone. Do not save user names or passwords in browsers.

Same thing happened to me. The hacker used a fake ID to buy a new phone for cash and cloned mine while pretending to be me. Sprint bypassed my security code and were ultimately held liable.