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A former telephone company employee is charged with conspiracy to commit fraud because he allegedly used his access to customer account data to take over the phone numbers of 19 customers, including at least one cryptocurrency holder.
Stephen Daniel DeFiore of Brandon, Florida, received approximately $ 2,325 between October 20, 2018 and November 9, 2018, in exchange for exchanging the SIM cards of the targeted customers with a co-conspirator, New Orleans prosecutors said earlier. said the week. The prosecutors sent DeFiore the customer’s phone number, a four-digit PIN and a SIM card number for each SIM exchange.
The charges come eight months after federal prosecutors charged Richard Yuan Li of Hercules, California, with conspiracy to commit fraud because of his alleged role in a SIM swap scam targeting at least 20 people. Li was in possession of an iPhone 8 on which the number of at least one of DeFiore’s victims was sent, prosecutors said.
The alleged victim was a medical doctor in the New Orleans area with cryptocurrency accounts including Binance, Bittrex, Coinbase, Gemini, Poloniex, ItBit and Neo Wallet. Li and his co-conspirators then allegedly gained access to the doctor’s email and cryptocurrency accounts and stole a “significant portion” of the victim’s possessions.
Prosecutors allege that even after the doctor retrieved the phone bill, Li or one of his co-conspirators called the doctor to say he had seen images in the doctor’s Gmail account and balances in the doctor’s cryptocurrency accounts. The caller then demanded 100 bitcoins, which at the time were worth about $ 640,000, in exchange for not publishing the photos or stealing the crypto-currency.
Prosecutors have not identified the phone company DeFiore worked for, but this LinkedIn profile contains a Stephen DiFiore who works as a Verizon customer service representative in Brandon, Florida. Verizon representatives did not immediately respond to an email for comment on this story. Attempts to reach DeFiore were unsuccessful.
The charges continue this week as the so-called SIM exchange crimes continue to increase, which is mainly motivated by criminals’ attempts to obtain large amounts of cryptocurrency in online accounts. Once an offender gains control of the victims’ phone bills, the perp typically uses access to recover accounts for email accounts and sets passwords for other accounts from there.
If convicted, DeFiore will face up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $ 250,000. Earlier this week, European officials announced the arrests of ten individuals in connection with a series of SIM swapping attacks that raised more than $ 100 million.