Verizon's TracFone Customers Complain of Attackers Stealing Their Phone Numbers

Attackers have commandeered thousands of TracFone customers' phone numbers in recent weeks, forcing new owner Verizon Communications to improve safeguards less than two months after it took over the prepaid wireless provider. From a report: TracFone offers prepaid wireless service under several brands, including Straight Talk, Total Wireless and its namesake brand. Some customers of Straight Talk said they found their phone lines suddenly disconnected around the December holidays. "We were recently made aware of bad actors gaining access to a limited number of customer accounts and, in some cases, fraudulently transferring, or porting out, mobile telephone numbers to other carriers," TracFone said in a notice posted on its website this month. In some cases, customers said they discovered their lines had been moved without their permission to Metro, a unit of T-Mobile US. A T-Mobile spokeswoman said the company investigated and found "no fraud or data breach of any sort" on its side. The company added that such unauthorized transfers "are unfortunately an industrywide issue." Verizon, which acquired TracFone in late November in a $6.25 billion deal, said it had added security protections to the recently acquired services to prevent such fraudulent transfers. For instance, the prepaid operators will now send customers a text message notification when a transfer request is made. A Verizon spokeswoman said the attack appeared to affect about 6,000 TracFone customers, a fraction of Verizon's roughly 24 million prepaid lines. "We have no reason to think that this was caused by anybody on the inside," the spokeswoman said. "You've got the bad actors out there constantly trying to find points of weakness," Matt Ellis, Verizon's finance chief, said Tuesday in an interview. "We've addressed that weakness."

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