Seven Citibank customers say a total of $600,000 disappeared from their bank accounts.
Chapman Ng of Daly City lost $80,000.
“I cannot even sleep to be honest,” Ng said.
Stephen Lee of San Jose was robbed of $81,000.
“I was being scammed. I did not know what happened,” Lee said.
And Kai Chin said she lost $65,000.
“Well, my heart was really pumping. So, I just, my hand was kind of shaking,” Chin said.
All seven victims have something in common. All were Citibank customers, lost their money via wire transfer and all victims happened to be Asian.
According to Chin, all of this started when someone changed the SIM card from his cell phone.
“Without proper ID, without my signature, somebody replaced my SIM card in Philadelphia. I’m in California,” he said.
From there, the hackers seemed to take over his Citibank account and wired $65,000 from it.
Mark Ostrowski of Checkpoint Software Technologies, an internet security firm, says “It’s called a SIM swap attack. It’s very common and has big consequences.”
And this is how it works: A scammer purchases your personal information from the dark web, goes into the store, and pretends to lose his phone. He gets a new SIM card and a new phone. He then connects it to your number.
Verizon says it is investigating.
“So it can have really dire effects when someone does a SIM swapping attack, because you lose that muti-factor authentification protection…
