Alert To All Crypto Holders - This Scam Is Dangerous!
Have you heard about Sim Swapping? This is probably one of the most popular and most dangerous scams right now. I personally just heard about it in the past few days and wanted to share with you this information. In this article we will talk about what Sim-Swapping actually is and how we can secure ourselves against it.
Sim Swapping
So what is this super scam that I am talking about? The scammers are actually using the fact that everybody nowadays is using a mobile phone. Since mobile phones have their unique phone number and more information due to the SIM card there is a single point of attack. But why do the scammers need your phone number or your SIM Card anyways? This is easy: Everybody who set up a brokerage account or a centralized crypto exchange account like the one on Coinbase has to confirm his identity with a Two-Factor-Authorization. In most cases this is done via Phone number or email.
With this information the scammer can easily gain access to your funds on your exchange and transfer all of your crypto to one of his wallets. Moreover, he can even drain all of your bank accounts that are connected to this crypto exchange and max them out, which is far more dangerous in my opinion. This means that a whole person’s existence can go to ruins. This is also possible if you have a Authentication app like Google’s one. The scammer just needs your email address which is equally easily to obtain.
How Do The Scammers Get The Information?
The scary thing is that everybody is at risk of this scam. I was feeling very naked and vulnerable when I first heard about this scam. The scammers are using flawed safety models of the mobile providers. Most of the time you have to go trough several security steps to access information about your SIM or mobile device. The trick the scammers are using is to request a set back of the SIM code. Even if they put in the wrong information they can try again at a later time and use the information from support calls that they gained. Step by step they acquire more and more information until they finally can reset the SIM Card information. This way they can easily access the your phone number over a different SIM Card. In some cases they have to intercept the newly sent SIM Card but I feel like this is just another easy step for these people. Now once they have your SIM Code they proceed to do the things that I mentioned in the first paragraphs.
How To Protect Yourself
To be honest, there is no easy way to protect yourself perfectly against that, but if you know a perfect way then let me know in the comments as I am very willing to try out any safety measure as this sounds very scary. The only things that I have in store is to avoid malicious links, never use the same password for important information such as LogIns for the crypto exchanges. Furthermore, do not sent any information over e-mail and never respond to people that you have doubts about. Last but not least, always secure your crypto in your own cold storage wallet. The famous saying “Not your keys, not your crypto” can not be more true in this case!
Conclusion
The crypto space and the Internet in general is a very dangerous place if you do not look out for yourself. That is why I think it is important to warn people about this sort of stuff as I think that we should stay together and fight off such scams as a unit. That is why I encourage you to post about any well known or new scams that you find out about as well as you know any methods to protect yourself!