SIM Card Swap: How To Stop The SCAM?

JustAskingg wrote:

I called T-Mobile customer service and asked them how to prevent this from happening. They said that whenever someone wants to swap their SIM card, T-Mobile sends a text to your phone BEFORE swapping it out. This is good because if you don't confirm that you want to do this (which fraudsters can't because they don't have your actual physical phone) then they have to go to a T-Mobile store to further complete the transaction, making it hard for them to follow through with the ruse.

So if this is true, why does it still keep happening? And what else can be done?

I was a victim of the SIM swap scam yesterday. My daughter and I are account owners. Both of us never got a text BEFORE the swap was initiated. Stll waiting to hear from TMo how this happened. Wen I got a new SIM at the store later in the day, I asked how the swap was done. She said that in their system, it says if it was done at the store or via customer care. In my case, that field showed N/A. Weird.

What should be done? The weakest link is the TMo person (store employee or customer care). Most likely they are not well trained. If training is the issue, the manager should be fired. If it was an inside job, the person who did the swap should be fired. My $0.02. In either case, the customer should be adequately compensated. If not, there is NO incentive for TMo to prevent these things from happening.

I worked at Bell Labs decades ago and when we were designing fault tolerant systems, our boss used to constantly say, “always check the checker”.