According to Tracfone (link here) many TracFone customers saw their numbers transferred to different carriers without their consent. These included Straight Talk and Total Wireless brands as well.
We were recently made aware of bad actors gaining access to a limited number of customer accounts and, in some cases, fraudulently transferring, or porting out, mobile telephone numbers to other carriers. These bad actors may have had access to your name, address, PIN code, account number, secret question (but not answer) and email address to the extent you provided us with such information.
The Wall St. Journal has reported that as many as 6,000 customers were impacted. Some saw their lines had been transferred to Metro by T-Mobile.
The Verge received an email from a T-Mobile spokesperson who said the company had investigated the issue,
“and there is no fraud or data breach of any sort on the T-Mobile side of these port-outs. More importantly, we do not ever possess or house the account number or PIN data that TracFone requires to validate an account and is necessary to conduct a port out of a TracFone customer, so this cannot occur from our side of the porting exercise.”
She added that the company was working with TracFone on the issue.
Last year, the FCC said it was looking into strengthening rules to reduce fraud, including those that port-out numbers.
TracFone urged customers to change their PIN numbers and said it had made “enhancements” to improve security.
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