SIM Swapping: How Hackers Stole Millions Worth of Crypto Via Victim’s Telecoms Operator

On Aug. 15, American investor Michael Terpin filed a $224 million lawsuit against AT&T. He believes that the telecoms giant had provided hackers with access to his phone number, which led to a major crypto heist.

Michael Terpin is a Puerto Rico-based entrepreneur and CEO of TransformGroup. He is also a co-founder of an angel group for Bitcoin (BTC) investors named BitAngels and of a digital currency fund, the BitAngels DApps Fund.

Terpin claims that he lost $24 million worth of cryptocurrencies as a result of two hacks that occured over the course of seven months: The 69-page complaint he filed with California law firm Greenberg Glusker mentions two seperate episodes, dated June 11, 2017 and Jan. 7, 2018. In both cases, as per the document, AT&T, of which Terpin was a longtime subscriber since the 1990s, failed to protect his digital identity.