Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency<br />Weeks lost his phone number and about a million dollars’ worth of virtual currency late last year, despite having asked<br />his mobile phone provider for additional security after his wife and parents lost control of their phone numbers.<br />After a first wave of phone porting attacks on the virtual currency community last winter, which was reported<br />by Forbes, their frequency appears to have ticked up, Mr. Perklin and other security experts said.<br />“It’s really highlighting the insecurity of using any kind of telephone-based security,” said Michael Perklin, the chief information<br />security officer at the virtual currency exchange ShapeShift, which has seen many of its employees and customers attacked.<br />Danny Yang, the founder of the virtual currency security firm BlockSeer, said he had traced several attacks to internet<br />addresses in the Philippines, though other attacks have been tracked to computers in Turkey and the United States.<br />In a growing number of online attacks, hackers have been calling up Verizon, T-Mobile U. S., Sprint<br />and AT&T and asking them to transfer control of a victim’s phone number to a device under the control of the hackers.<br />Mr. Perklin and other people who have investigated recent hacks said the assailants generally succeeded by delivering sob stories about an emergency<br />that required the phone number to be moved to a new device — and by trying multiple times until a gullible agent was found.
