Fraud on my phone

[skinzfan23]

Didn’t know this was a thing, but I am in the process of getting access to my phone restored.

Late last night I got a notification that my password for my phone account through Verizon was changed. Basically, I’m assuming a bot, was able to access my account and completed a port out of my phone number to a completely different phone. Needless to say, it’s very difficult to prove who you are when you can’t receive any text verifications and they also seemed to be able to hack into other various accounts as a result of having my phone number and getting verifications to able to change passwords.

I am prob crazy but at one point I was up 33 straight hrs since yesterday trying to chat and prove who I was with Verizon. They finally were able to confirm and will hopefully get my email added to the account tomorrow so I will have access to my phone again.

Crazy world we live in.

[BRoss]

It's getting worse with AI now. My girlfriend's dad had his phone get malware recently and had to go into a store to get it straightened out.

My recommendation is to use MFA everywhere you can, especially on your primary email. You can use apps such as Authy to help manage this.

And always use different passwords for each account you create on every site. You can get password managers that can sync to multiple devices. My phone, tablet, and PC all share the same database and gets synced through my cloud storage account.

[nebugeater]

After using Google Password Manager and having an issue about 18 Months ago that I felt was from there, I dumped it and changed all my passwords. I had multiple accounts hacked at the same time, each with different passwords. Amazing that a few months later there was a press release that the Google password management system had been breached

Fast forward to now, and after a LOT of research and being gun-shy, I use Keeper as a password managment system It is a paid system, but that is not an issue, as I only mention it as an FYI

A lot of major corporations use it, and our Contract IT company, which I work with at a good level, uses it and recommends it as one of only a few choices to consider.

I have the five-user account and share it with my family, and they are all using it now too.

https://www.keepersecurity.com/

Sometimes, if you have a day, I will share my experience spending days getting things reviewed and $$$$$ corrected.

[skinzfan23]

Wow, crazy to hear all that. I am still waiting to get access to my phone back. They sent me an email saying they updated my account to the new email but due to other security measures they are still working to restore access back to me. I managed to change my bank account to prevent anything further from happening there. The tough thing is that most of my accounts: Amazon, paypal, ebay, etc require a message to be sent to me for verification and without that I can't log into those accounts yet to check for fraud.

[nebugeater]

Wow, crazy to hear all that. I am still waiting to get access to my phone back. They sent me an email saying they updated my account to the new email but due to other security measures they are still working to restore access back to me. I managed to change my bank account to prevent anything further from happening there. The tough thing is that most of my accounts: Amazon, paypal, ebay, etc require a message to be sent to me for verification and without that I can't log into those accounts yet to check for fraud.

Some accounts that require a text confirmation have a backup alternate email. Make sure you are using that when it is available. Learned about this through my process too, and it is not always an obvious option.

I use two form cofirmation any more on anything that offers is