My Identity Was Stolen and Used to Commit Fraud
This may serve as a cautionary tale for anyone looking to change their mobile number. I recently changed my role in DataRobot, returning to Singapore as General Manager for Asia-Pacific. Before leaving, I terminated my contract with T-Mobile for my US mobile number (857-234-XXXX). A few weeks ago, DataRobot started receiving abusive inbound messages accusing me of stealing money and committing fraud. Twitter also deactivated my account because of numerous reports that it was being used for fraud. Finally, I get a message from a Private Investigator who tells me that my old mobile phone is being used by someone to impersonate me to scam people out of their savings. Clearly, the scammer has acquired my old number, done a reverse number lookup and fathomed that “Tim Young” is an upstanding pillar of the community whom he can impersonate to convince the unsuspecting to buy Bitcoin at giveaway prices. While it is straightforward for me to disprove all of this, it's not pleasant receiving abusive messages. Or constantly having to get my social media accounts reactivated. Or even thinking that someone is thinking badly about me.
What surprises me most in all of this is how quickly T-Mobile re-used my old number. I have reported this to their Fraud Team but am yet to hear back. It also occurs to me that we leave so much information about ourselves online it doesn't take much analysis for someone to reconstruct a virtual version of oneself. Maybe being shut down by Twitter is a good thing?
Self Employed at Shana Porcellino
5 年Hi - I sent you a tweet, I can understand if you are suspicious about it given what happened to you but as I was just a victim of fraud with that same number I was really wondering if you had any type of LE contact or detective that I can reach out to because I have done a ton of research on my own. I was just looking for a point in the right direction, I don’t need any information or anything from you unless you would like to provide it - If you need me to verify my identity or anything else I am able to do that and I have no problem.If you don’t want to be involved in any of this at all, I understand that too so if it’s just a matter of passing along the contact it really would be much appreciated. I would love to be a part of stopping these people.
Building a scalable human-level AI platform for automating data science
5 年Sad to hear
Client Executive | High Tech | Gartner
5 年This is terrible Tim and I hope it all get rectified for you ASAP.
Regional Director - PingCAP, the company behind TiDB
5 年That's quite scary?