The Da Nang Police Department has alerted mobile carriers and the public about an increase in Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) swapping, in which criminals steal money from virtual currency accounts.

Illustrative image (Source: https://tamnhin.trithuccuocsong.vn/)

SIM swapping is now happening remotely when scammers can access and use your personal information to impersonate you and convince the mobile carrier of your phone to reassign your phone number to a new SIM card. That's when scammers can gain control of your phone data, change your passwords and access your accounts.

Scammers sometimes use social engineering to impersonate the victim and trick the mobile carrier to switch the victim's mobile number to a SIM card in the scammer's possession.

As reported, recently, fraudsters have performed tricks to appropriate the right to use personal phone SIM cards, thereby appropriating passwords for social network , bank and virtual currency accounts.

It is known that the subjects collected personal information of the victim in cyberspace.  Taking advantage of the fact that mobile carriers allow mobile subscribers to enjoy ‘call forward’ that can be used to forward incoming calls to another phone number.

The scammer impersonates the mobile carrier to request the victim to upgrade the 3G SIM into 4G and 5G ones for better quality, in tandem with asking the victim to text according to the given object syntax. This is essentially a syntax that allows the mobile subscriber to redirect calls to any phone number.

After the victim successfully sends a message according to this syntax, the victim loses control of the SIM.Once a scammer swaps the SIM, the victim's calls, texts and other data are downloaded to the scammer's device, which allows them to use "forgot password" or "account recovery" options with the victim's accounts associated with their email and phone number.

The mobile carrier will send a one-time password (OTP) to the SIM that the scammer has just appropriated.

Therefore, the fraudster easily hijacks the victim's social network, bank and virtual currency accounts to illegally appropriate money or borrow money through online lending software, resulting in the victim owing large amounts of money.

Reporting by LE HUNG – Translating by A.THU