A Terrifying Tale of Identity Theft, And What We Can Learn From It
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In My Phone, My Credit Card, My Hacker, and Me, Avery Hartmans tells a terrifying tale of phone, credit card, and identity theft. I highly recommend the article, but here’s the TLDR:
Hartmans receives a message from Verizon telling her she has activated a new device. Thinking this was in error, she ignores it.
The next morning, her phone stops working.
Within hours, $10,000 in mysterious charges (at an Apple Store, Gucci, and another store) appear on her Chase credit card.
Hartmans lives in NYC. The fraudulent charges are all from stores in Columbus, Ohio.
Hartmans immediately locks her credit card, but the next day, the thief opens a new Best Buy credit card in her name.
The author then spends the next several weeks trying to figure out what in the world happened to her and convincing Chase to reverse the charges. The Columbus police department, which receives over 7,000 fraud reports per year and has only five officers who look into cyber crimes, decides the case isn’t worth their time.
Hartmans is a tech-savvy reporter for an online magazine. She seems to do all the right things—she uses two-factor authentication (2FA) on her phone and credit card account, she promptly reports the fraudulent charges, and she doggedly fights Chase when they initially refuse to refund her money. And yet she still was a victim of identity theft, and undoing the resulting damage took weeks.
What went wrong?
Hartmans was the victim of what appears to be a combination of two fairly sophisticated types of theft.
First, the thief “SIM-swapped” Hartmans’ phone by simply walking into a Verizon store, claiming to be her, and asking the store to set up Hartmans’ account on the thief’s phone. Amazingly, beyond some minimal identity verification (which the thief bypassed using a fake ID), most cellphone carriers will do this without question.
Second, the thief managed to intercept a physical credit card mailed to Hartmans. With this card, they were then able to specifically target her and then use the physical card in stores, which made it much easier to evade fraud detection. Even Chase didn’t believe that Hartmans had been scammed, because the thief had her physical card as well as access to her texts.
How might you protect yourself from a thief like this?
First, follow the tips in Keeping Your Finances Secure. Notably, if you use an authenticator app for some of your acounts, rather than simple SMS, it might be harder for a thief to take advantage of your phone account. And if you use a basic, low-cost credit monitoring service, you’d be able to quickly see if the thief had opened any new accounts in your name.
Next, don’t have too many credit cards. Having more than a couple of credit cards makes it more likely that you might miss some suspicious charges, and also more likely that a thief may be able to steal a new card of yours in the mail.
Also, consider a credit freeze. A credit freeze lets you prevent thieves from opening new accounts in your name, though note that it would not protect you from the theft from an existing account.
Finally, act quickly when you notice anything suspicious. Hartmans should have called Verizon Wireless immediately (using Verizon’s customer service number on their website) to ask what was going on. If she’d called them the day she received the message about a new device being activated on her account, she probably could have stopped the thief immediately. Instead, the next several weeks of her life (including her wedding!) were filled with attempts to undo the damage.
And now, Andrew’s pick(s) of the week:
The Gambler Who Beat Roulette. An amazing article, but please don’t try this!
$388 in Sushi. Just a $20 Tip: The Brutal Math of UberEats and DoorDash. Lots of sympathy for the drivers here, but also feel it’s a bit harsh on the people ordering. What is a fair tip for delivery? Given that >90% of the labor of an order is in the driving and delivery, should a driver earn so much less for a small order than a big one? Is it a good equilibrium for companies to incentivize drivers to shun smaller orders and waste time parked outside fancy restaurants to try to snag a big one?
And finally, around here, ticket evasion has reached epidemic levels, with over $2 billion in unpaid fines (including parking and speeding tickets). I knew things had gotten really bad when, walking by our kids’ school, I passed a luxury car with a fake-looking police placard and a license plate cover clearly designed to obscure the plate. Have others noticed this lately?
I hope this has been helpful. If you liked it, please share it on social media! Also, please send me your feedback, requests, and success stories.