Europol busts up two SIM-swapping hacking rings

What a nightmare: your phone goes dead, and you can’t log into your bank account because it’s controlled by a hacker who’s draining you dry. After months-long, cross-border investigations, Europol announced on Friday that it’s arrested more than two dozen people suspected of draining bank accounts by hijacking victims’ phone numbers via SIM-swap fraud. Following a ramp-up in SIM-jacking over recent months, police across Europe have been gearing up to dismantle criminal networks that organize these attacks, Europol says.

That growth mirrors what’s happening in the US: In October, the FBI warned that bad guys were getting around some types of two-factor authentication (2FA). The easiest – and, therefore, the most common – way to sneak past 2FA is SIM-swap fraud, where an attacker convinces a mobile network (or bribes an employee) to port a target’s mobile number or plants malware on a victim’s phone, thereby allowing them to intercept 2FA security codes sent via SMS text.

Source: sophos.com