Bad actors attempt fraud every day. Whether it’s tricking grandma into giving her life savings or someone pretending to be an employee when they’re really not, fraud is a widespread issue that companies and governments are constantly fighting.
Recently, it seems T-Mobile has been dealing with a situation in New York City where a person was signing up customers illegitimately, potentially for over a decade. We first learned about the issue via Reddit, where a user shared that T-Mobile had lost their numbers. The description the user gave, however, was quite odd.
They stated that T-Mobile contacted them to “move [their] numbers to a different account for some odd reason”. The URL in the text from T-Mobile, included in one of the user’s screenshots, led to a support page that managed to give more questions than answers.
Contact T-Mobile Immediately
The support page sent to the user said that there was an issue with their account, in that it was being “managed through a third party that is not authorized to represent T-Mobile.” It goes on to instruct the user what to do, and that if they don’t hear from the customer, their account, including their phone numbers, will be permanently disconnected.
The message was sent to affected customers on February 4th, just two weeks before the scheduled disconnection on February 18th. That’s a pretty small window of time, especially if it’s lines of service that have been active for a while.
So what really happened here? We asked around, and got a bit of inside info.
A Team Of Fraudsters
When customers reach out to T-Mobile to fix this issue, the representative has the ability to look up the incident internally and reference documents in order to fix the issue.
In this case, one document, shared with us anonymously from a source inside T-Mobile, details the wording that employees can use to explain the situation. It details that T-Mobile’s fraud department found that a specific person, named in the document (who we won’t name here for privacy reasons), was “engaging in fraudulent and unauthorized conduct in violation of T-Mobile’s Terms and Conditions.”
It goes on to almost put the blame on the customer, and mentions that allowing this person, or their “associates”, to manage the customer’s account or line is prohibited, and will result in termination.
This alone implies that a small group of people, led by this named person, were responsible for some sort of fraudulent signup for new T-Mobile customers. We suspect that this group was creating one or multiple business or personal accounts and opening new lines under those accounts for people.
We’re unsure of the overall reach of this group, nor what exact methods were used, however one source says the reach was about 700+ accounts.
T-Mobile Statement
Before we go into speculation and share allegations made in the comments of the previously mentioned Reddit post, we’ll share T-Mobile’s official stance.
We reached out to T-Mobile on this subject and they had this statement to share:
We identified and shut down unauthorized reseller activity tied to a small group of accounts. We’re taking care of these customers, and we reached out to let them know to contact us so their service can get moved to a new eligible account. We also directed customers to a landing page with additional information to help make the process as simple as possible.
– T-Mobile
In addition, a source has assured us that the fraudulent signups did not occur in a T-Mobile store, neither corporate-owned nor authorized third-party, and that the person involved was not an employee. That does, however, contradict both the original Reddit poster as well as a few people in the comments that appear to be employees.
Fraudulent Accounts As Far Back As 2016?
As mentioned, a few comments on the Reddit post potentially sheds a bit more light into the situation. Keep in mind, though, these are completely unofficial claims and should be regarded as rumor until proven.
On the topic of where these fraudulent accounts were set up, one user who seems to be an employee claims that it was in a third-party retail store, however we’re not confident that is the case. Even so, we’ve included the comment below.
I can’t disclose how I know this, but this is apart of a campaign where certain accounts were not set up appropriately, through the proper channels (in third party retail stores).
Another user, also presenting as an employee, explains a bit more detail about the situation.
Apparently, this was super localized to target the Asian community, and the employee above had multiple customers that needed help with the fraud situation. In one case, a user in NYC was setup under an account based in Las Vegas.
This is the New York Reseller fraud issue that I’ve been dealing with for the last few weeks as an employee in a highly populated Asian area here in NYC. I’m sorry this has happened to you but as per our official documents […], the numbers cannot be retrieved. Once the line is officially terminated on the 18th, there is no way […] to retrieve it.
I had a customer who had his number for 15 years lose his numbers this way because he did not finish out the COR process…
[…]
The lines technically belonged (emphasis on past tense) to the main account holder, all of these accounts were opened under T-Mobile in association to an authorized retailer but the manager/employees running this TPR must have worked under extremely shady business practices.
I had one customer tell me that their billing address was inputted as a Las Vegas, NV address (they live in NYC), their autopay info was collected personally by the employees there, and that the autopay method on file was the TPR manager’s personal debit card which would sometimes get declined, thus causing their lines to get suspended multiple times over the course of 8 years.
If true, this would suggest that this situation has been ongoing for a while. In fact, in the comments, the original poster says the account was set up 10+ years ago.
We’ve actually been in contact privately with the original poster, and they’ve said they moved to Verizon after this incident. They say that 3 of their 4 phone numbers were lost, even though they completed the migration to a new account prior to the deadline. We forwarded their info to T-Mobile directly, and we hope they’re able to at least recover their numbers.
Additional Details
Since this article went live (around noon Eastern on February 25th), we’ve had a source reach out with more info.
Apparently, the named person involved was within the Chinese community in New York City, and was essentially targeting individuals in that community. They would create accounts for the customer, but setup online access via their own personal email. They therefore managed everything on the account.
The bad actor then would charge customers full price for phones, but buy them on EIP on accounts, sometimes not even on the same account as the line that would be using it. Sometimes new “customers” were signed up with lines on other people’s accounts.
The entire time, this person was collecting payments from these victims, and even charging a $50 “fee” to restore service when accounts ended up past due for non-payment.
There are even claims that the person would take EBT cards from the elderly victims to pay off other bills.
Overall, this seems like reliable info, and would match up with T-Mobile’s side of the story entirely.
Moving Forward
It’s surprising that such a situation was ongoing for so long. It’s great that T-Mobile was able to catch the fraud happening and fix the situation, but we’d have preferred a bit larger of a window of time for customers to correct their accounts.
In discussions with the customer of the original Reddit post, they said they were actually out of the country for half of that two-week window. It’s understandable that T-Mobile might want to quickly resolve the issue, but not allowing the customer’s numbers to be retrieved after that two-week window, if true, is not very nice.
We’re also missing a few details of how this fraud happened. Naturally, T-Mobile wants to keep the specifics to themselves to prevent additional attempts at fraud, but it’s still an interesting case. Did it happen in a real T-Mobile authorized retailer location like the customer claims? Or was it someone pretending to be a representative of T-Mobile but located somewhere else, like a repair shop?
We will probably never know for sure what happened. Even so, it’s a fascinating glimpse into the types of fraud T-Mobile deals with.
If you were affected by this NYC-specific fraud case, let us know if you were able to save your numbers and what the details were of your original signup. We’re curious!
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