Mobile Store Owner Sentenced to 10 Years for Scheme to Illegally Unlock Phones

Reading the headline, I thought what a harsh sentence for jailbreaking a few phones. Turns out we have to come up with a new word for what has been going on here.<p>This isn’t about DFU mode, exploiting bugs, or clever SIM hacks. These people broke into the telcom systems to actually unlock these devices for good.<p>«In total, Khudaverdyan and others compromised and stole more than 50 different T-Mobile employees’ credentials from employees across the United States, and they unlocked and unblocked hundreds of thousands of cellphones during the years of the scheme. Khudaverdyan obtained more than $25 million for these criminal activities.»

&gt;one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, three counts of wire fraud, two counts of accessing a computer to defraud and obtain value, one count of intentionally accessing a computer without authorization to obtain information, one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, five counts of money laundering, and one count of aggravated identity theft.<p>Which one of these charges is illegally unlocking phones? He went to prison for hacking T-Mobile, the title seems like it&#x27;s trying to scare potential jailbreakers.

??? Locking phones should have been illegal. You can enforce contracts through other means, all locking does is prevent the owner from switching carriers at the end of a term or legally reselling the phone after it&#x27;s paid off and they get a new one...<p>Unblocking stolen phones I can understand but carriers got away with locking phones for far too long.

&gt; To gain unauthorized access to T-Mobile’s protected internal computers, Khudaverdyan obtained T-Mobile employees’ credentials through various dishonest means, including sending phishing emails that appeared to be legitimate T-Mobile correspondence, and socially engineering the T-Mobile IT Help Desk. Khudaverdyan used the fraudulent emails to trick T-Mobile employees to log in with their employee credentials so he could harvest the employees’ information and fraudulently unlock the phones.<p>&gt; In total, Khudaverdyan and others compromised and stole more than 50 different T-Mobile employees’ credentials from employees across the United States, and they unlocked and unblocked hundreds of thousands of cellphones during the years of the scheme.<p>&gt; Khudaverdyan obtained more than $25 million for these criminal activities.

There seems to be some misunderstandings in this thread. Anyone who has paid off their device can already get it unlocked from all the major carriers for free. 99% of the unlocks of this guy and similar services perform are for phones obtained by theft or fraud. They are either robbed from T-Mobile stores or they are obtained by &quot;credit muling.&quot; Credit muling is where various sketchy people round up homeless or desperate people who need cash to go into cell phone stores and get as many phones as they can on credit with no intention of paying the phone off. The recruiters then take the phones and pay the &quot;mules&quot; a nominal fee like $100-200. This fraud costs carriers billions of dollars each year and makes everyone&#x27;s cell phones bills higher.

10 years and $28,473,535 seems excessive (as noted by others elizabeth holmes only got 11 for what seems a far larger, more potentially-destructive fraud).<p>what&#x27;s the logic behind this sentencing? or is there no logic and its some sort of regulatory capture and t-mobile et al want to make an example ?

Excuse my ignorance about the US justice system, but do I get correctly that the Theranos folks got like 11-13 years? Seems disproportionate.

Gross. Locking phones to a carrier is clearly an anti-competitive practice that should have been found to be illegal ages ago.

It seems like the reasoning is a bit off here. Unlocking phones shouldn&#x27;t be an issue - it should be the fact that he surreptitiously accessed protected systems that matters.

How much does someone want to bet that SBF gets less than 10 years for his scheme to defraud millions of people?

I never understood the economics of cell phone carrier locking.<p>So you buy a phone that is meant to be paid off over a 3 year contract. Then you unlock it and sell it. That doesn&#x27;t invalidate the contract, does it? Is it that easy to walk away from such contracts?

Certainly some criminal behavior that deserves charges. However, I think this is quite minor when compared to the behaviors of sbf and holmes.

Lots of telco bootlicking and &quot;what about muh corporate profits&quot; in this thread on &quot;hacker&quot; news.

The store owner didn&#x27;t steal enough, apparently. He&#x27;ll pay for lesser theft by going to prison.