Thousands of TracFone users are encountering issues with their phone numbers.
Malicious actors transferred the accounts to different carriers without the users' consent. Straight Talk and Total Wireless subscribers are also affected by this data breach.
Fortunately, TracFone seems aware of the issue.
According to The Wall Street Journal, approximately 6,000 TracFone subscribers filed complaints about their hacked accounts.
Many of them saw their lines transferred to T-Mobile's Metro PCS service.
Verizon Data Breach: Numbers Transferred to Metro PCS
T-Mobile spokesperson Tara Darrow told The Verge that their company had nothing to do with the attack.
She pointed out there was no fraud or data breach of any kind in their systems.
Darrow also explained that T-Mobile "do not ever possess or house the account number or PIN data that TracFone requires to validate an account and is necessary to conduct a port out of a TracFone customer, so this cannot occur from our side of the porting exercise."
She added that T-Mobile was cooperating with TracFone to investigate the ongoing issue.
Verizon Tracfone Login Problems
TracFone officially revealed the issue in a public notice.
They said, "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 emphasized that malicious actors might have gained access to subscribers' information like name, address, PIN code, account number, and email address.
As such, subscribers are advised to look out for fraud or scams that exploit this kind of information.
The Verge interviewed one of the victims of this data breach.
Steven Simms of Atlanta said he was subscribed to Total Wireless for about three years. But sometime on December 21, he discovered that this phone number was already ported to Metro PCS without his permission.
The sudden change caused severe damage to his lifestyle.
As a small business owner, he lost money because his clients could no longer contact him.
Simms also said the issue was hard to resolve. When he asked for help from customer service, they said they had already requested Metro PCS to return his number.
It took 12 days to complete the process.
How to Stay Safe From Data Breach: Tracfone Plans and Account Security
Tracfone said they are taking action to uncover the fraudulent activity.
On top of this, they reportedly "made enhancements to improve the security of (your) mobile account."
According to Tracfone, there will be a new system that sends a message alert whenever a request to transfer a number is made.
The system will text a unique code that will be essential for completing an account transfer.
Note that this message will also include a number to contact the service. If the user did not request the transfer, they are advised to use this number to contact Tracfone immediately.
Hopefully, these countermeasures will help keep future subscribers safe.
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