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An Anecdote

1 pointsby ninetaxalmost 12 years ago
Someone just tried to claim my phone number through Google voice by SMS phishing me.<p>I got a text saying &quot;Your Google account has been compromised, reply back to verify your account&quot;<p>Well that smelled like a phishing scam, but these thing haven&#x27;t really happened to me before and I was curious where this was going. I thought I could probably catch what was going to happen before I was phished.<p>So I replied &quot;K&quot;. Then I got a text saying &quot;Please enter the verification code -68- when We will call you.&quot;<p>I couldn&#x27;t really tell what the angle was yet, but I thought &quot;as long as I don&#x27;t give away secret information like a password or a 2 factor auth token, I&#x27;ll be fine&quot;<p>Then I got a call from a number in DC. It was a automated message telling me to enter my code. It sounded an awful lot like the legitimate automated Google services. I was too curious, I couldn&#x27;t resist. I entered the code.<p>A second later I got an email alert from Google telling me my phone number that was linked to Google voice had been claimed by someone else. Then I figured out what happened.<p>They used a Google voice account to try to claim my number as their own. Google voice tries to verify that you own a number by giving that number a call and having you enter a 2 digit code. So they had me enter the 2 digit code for them...<p>After that they could have used my number however they liked, and given that banks and other institutions use phone numbers as a way to ID customers they might have been able to do some damage with it if they knew more about me.<p>I took the number back using the same way they had taken it from me. Hopefully they didn&#x27;t call anyone in those 2 minutes it took to do that.<p>I guess the lesson here is that I can&#x27;t really outsmart a scam as easily as I thought I could.

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