SIM Hijacking: How One Group Of Hackers Got Away With $5 Million Worth Of BTC

The newest case about SIM hijacking makes cryptojacking a business for babies. According to the news reported by Motherboard, a 20-year old college student from Boston, Massachusetts got arrested this month on charges of being part of a group that hacked cellphone numbers before stealing more than $5 million USD in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

As the source reported, the number of cell phone numbers that one Bostonian named Joel Ortiz and his accomplices hacked in a technique known as SIM swapping (hijacking) counted about 40.

The real power of SIM hijacking, in this case, is to trick the mobile operators into transferring the phone number of a target to a SIM card that is controlled by the criminal. As soon as the criminals obtain the numbers, they can reset the passwords before accessing the online accounts of their victims.

The goal for Ortiz was to target players in the blockchain and cryptocurrency fields. This is how they stole over $1.5 million from one blockchain entrepreneur during Consensus 2018 which took place in May. According to court documents, once Ortiz took control of the cellphone of the victim, he reset the password of his email address and gained access to his BTC holdings.

What ‘lured’ the police to arrest Ortiz was one unnamed victim reporting to the police that his cell phone number had been stolen. Obviously, he was a victim of Ortiz earlier this year. After partnering with the telecommunications giant AT&T, the police located the numbers of the phones the SIM hijacker had been using and gained access to the email accounts linked to them – as evidence of potential criminal activity.

Ortiz used Binance, Bittrex, and Coinbase to obtain information and move more than $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies.

Earlier this year, the FBI released a statement for what is labeled as ‘tech support fraud’. In it, the FBI stated:

“Criminals pose as virtual currency support. Victims contact fraudulent virtual currency support numbers usually located via open source searches. The fraudulent support asks for access to the victim’s virtual currency wallet and transfers the victim’s virtual currency to another wallet for temporary holding during maintenance. The virtual currency is never returned to the victim, and the criminal ceases all communication,”