Yeah so my mom's phone got hacked a few days ago. Other than freezing her bank account what else can we do? They took money from the checking account.

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t-poke t1_ja8qxtj wrote on February 27, 2023 at 6:02 PM

Phones don’t get hacked. That only happens in movies. There’s more to the story here.

ahecht t1_ja8xrz5 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 6:45 PM

Phones don't get hacked, but phone accounts do. Just google "simjacking" or "Sim swap fraud". All it takes is a little social engineering to get the representative at your phone company to move your number to a new phone, and now all the 2FA and password recovery texts from your bank are going to the scammer. T-Mobile has been hit with this pretty hard recently because scammers are able to use the data from the data breach to get into people's accounts.

Energizer100 OP t1_ja8s6lf wrote on February 27, 2023 at 6:10 PM

She went to ATT today to change numbers. She was able to text through her phone on Friday but since then whenever any of us have been calling it goes to a random number.

fluffy_bunny22 t1_ja8seez wrote on February 27, 2023 at 6:12 PM

Sounds like she got scammed not hacked. Especially if she changed her number. You don't change your number if your phone gets hacked.

PinkbunnymanEU t1_ja8wlp9 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 6:38 PM

>You don't change your number if your phone gets hacked.

This

You don't change your ISP if your pc gets hacked.

If your phone gets "hacked" (IE a virus etc) the phone gets wiped.

It's an important distinction because one is not clicking dodgy links and cyber health, the other is making sure you think before you hand over bank details. Being scammed isn't "shes stupid" it's "she was caught off guard, or without knowledge to defend against the scam"

The change of number is usually because when one person falls victim to a scam the number is passed around because they're more likely to get scammed again without the extra knowledge.

Liquidretro t1_ja91k52 wrote on February 27, 2023 at 7:09 PM

Has she reported the fraudulent activities to her bank?

I agree that her physical phone was unlikely to be hacked, but her provider account may have been, she fell victim to some other type of scam. The other somewhat common way is through password reuse.

While this isn't identity theft, there are a lot of things on the guide that would be a good idea to follow here to secure her accounts https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/identity_theft/