T-Mobile Is Sending a Mass Text Warning of ‘Industry-Wide’ Phone Hijacking Scam

If you’re a customer of T-Mobile in the United States, you may have recently gotten a somewhat alarming, and perhaps confusing, text message.

This is a legitimate, real T-Mobile alert, the company confirmed to Motherboard on Monday. A company representative said T-Mobile is messaging its “entire post-paid customer base,” but some customers may have yet to receive the alert as “that takes time and can’t be done all at once.”

“Phone number port out scam” is an obscure term, but it refers to a relatively simple, highly effective and dangerous hack. The scammer calls T-Mobile (or another cell phone provider), or goes to a store, and impersonates the target victim, requesting a new SIM card for the victim’s phone number. The same process works also by “porting” the phone number to another provider, giving the attacker access to the victim’s phone number.

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