Nine Charged in Alleged SIM Swapping Ring

Eight Americans and an Irishman have been charged with wire fraud this week for allegedly hijacking mobile phones through SIM-swapping, a form of fraud in which scammers bribe or trick employees at mobile phone stores into seizing control of the target’s phone number and diverting all texts and phone calls to the attacker’s mobile device. From there, the attackers simply start requesting password reset links via text message for a variety of accounts tied to the hijacked phone number.

All told, the government said this gang — allegedly known to its members as “The Community” — made more than $2.4 million stealing cryptocurrencies and extorting people for restoring access to social media accounts that were hijacked after a successful SIM-swap.

Six of those charged this week in Michigan federal court were alleged to have been members of The Community of serial SIM swappers. They face a fifteen count indictment, including charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and aggravated identity theft (a charge that carries a mandatory two-year sentence). A separate criminal complaint unsealed this week charges three former employees of mobile phone providers accused of collaborating with The Community’s members.

Several of those charged have been mentioned by this blog previously. In August 2018, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that police in Florida arrested 25-year-old Pasco County, Fla. city employee Ricky Joseph Handschumacher, charging him with grand theft and money laundering. As I reported in that story, “investigators allege Handschumacher was part of a group of at least nine individuals scattered across multiple states who for the past two years have drained bank accounts via an increasingly common scheme involving mobile phone “’SIM swaps.’”

This blog also has featured several stories about the escapades of Ryan Stevenson, a 26-year-old West Haven, Conn. man who goes by the hacker name “Phobia.” Most recently, I wrote about how Mr. Stevenson earned a decent number of bug bounty rewards and public recognition from top telecom companies for finding and reporting security holes in their Web sites — all the while secretly operating a service that leveraged these same flaws to sell their customers’ personal data to people who were active in the SIM swapping community.

One of the six men charged in the conspiracy — Colton Jurisic, 20 of, Dubuque, Iowa — has been more well known under his hacker alias “Forza,” and “ForazaTheGod.” In December 2016, KrebsOnSecurity heard from a woman who had her Gmail, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts hijacked after a group of individuals led by Forza taunted her on Twitter as they took over her phone account.

“They failed to get [her three-letter Twitter account name, redacted] because I had two-factor authentication turned on for twitter, combined with a new phone number of which they were unaware,” the source said in an email to KrebsOnSecurity in 2016. “@forzathegod had the audacity to even tweet me to say I was about to be hacked.”

Also part of the alleged Community of SIM swappers is Conor Freeman, 20, of Dublin, Ireland; Reyad Gafar Abbas, 19, of Rochester, New York; Garrett Endicott, 21, of Warrensburg, Missouri.

The three men criminally accused of working with the six through their employment at mobile phone stores are Fendley Joseph, 28, of Murrietta, Calif.; Jarratt White, 22, and Robert Jack, 22, both from Tucson, Ariz.

If convicted on the charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, each defendant faces a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.  The charges of wire fraud each carry a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Last month, 20-year-old college student and valedictorian Joel Ortiz became the first person ever to be sentenced for SIM swapping — pleading guilty to a ten year stint in prison for stealing more than $5 million in cryptocurrencies from victims and then spending it lavishly at elaborate club parties in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

A copy of the indictment against the six men is here (PDF).