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This happened to me about a year and a half ago, luckily I only lost a couple bitcoins that I had in coinbase, it could have been a lot worse. The major crux o
by pdeuchler 10y ago
This happened to me about a year and a half ago, luckily I only lost a couple bitcoins that I had in coinbase, it could have been a lot worse.
The major crux of this article is the paragraph where it talks about how regulations essentially allow phone carriers to do whatever they want, with no guarantees of security, no indemnity, and if anything goes wrong there's no repercussions whatsoever.
There is literally nothing you can do to prevent this, any kind of "flags" or "extra security" you request are entirely enforced at the whim of individual call center personnel, and it only takes one person to ignore them. My case was similar to the article, I had some basic security flags enabled on the account but they were buried in notes from calls years ago and obviously no CS rep is going to read through years of notes on every call.
In my case the attackers called Sprint customer service over 100 times over a 5 day span. On the day I was breached they called 12 times within 3 hours before a weak link allowed them to transfer my number. No alerts to myself or the account holder, no notifications, nothing. The first rep I called after this occurred gave me great detail into the calls and what they had asked, apparently some of the numbers even came from different European countries. I immediately tried to escalate to their fraud department and was stonewalled hard. The fraud people denied any pattern of calling into their support lines, denied any transfer of my number (even though reps later happily helped transfer it back from Google Voice), and denied any action on the part of Sprint that caused this to happen.
Lawyers essentially told me I was out of luck, there was no recourse unless I was willing to go to war in the courtroom and unfortunately I don't have _that_ many old BTC.
It is absurd that such telecommunications backbones have such lax policies, much less no repercussions when they screw up. This will continue to be an attack vector until we force some sort of regulation that requires extraordinary damages to be paid per case... something tells me even low fines and slaps on the wrist won't incentivize the telecoms to provide actual customer service.
- jbmorgado 10y ago> The major crux of this article is the paragraph where it talks about how regulations essentially allow phone carriers to do whatever they want So, in a word, phone carriers are actually unregulated when it comes to the relevant facts in here. Isn't that a paradox then? Using bitcoin in order to deregulate the financial system and then ask more regulation for phone carriers in order to protect your unregulated bitcoin?
- onetwotree 10y agoOnly if you're in the ALL REGULATION BAD|GOOD camp. It's more nuanced than that for most of us.
- Dylan16807 10y agoAnti "regulation" people are usually pretty big on contracts being enforced. The phone company giving away a number in a world where numbers are used to verify identity is a big deal along those terms.
- jbmorgado 10y agoThe contract of the phone company was being enforced, there was nothing in that contract regarding the matter at hand. The OP was asking that the phone companies should have more regulations in place to go beyond the contract being offered.
- UweSchmidt 10y ago"Real" bitcoining doesn't use services like coinbase; the coins are on your computer which you have to secure yourself. At least this is what you get told in cryptocurrency forums when one of the exchanges get hacked.
- tokenizer 10y agoNo it's true. Exchanges are prime targets, so it's risky. Wallets on desktops come in a variety of flavours, and can be secured. Getting root access to your device is trickey, let alone they would not know you have your bitcoin. Beyond that, the pros and experts who have a lot do cold storage. Putting the keys offline.
- jbmorgado 10y agoYou didn't read TFA. There were no online exchanges involved, the bitcoin wallet was in his computer.
- 10y ago
- nommm-nommm 10y agoYou probably had/have a good chance in small claims court.
- kilroy123 10y agoAgreed. Or maybe even a settlement.
- flurdy 10y agoIs there not an ombudsman you can take this to for them to fight these claims for you? I know in the UK I would have spoken to OFCOM or CISAS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman