Quote Originally Posted by Michael Weber View Post
Jim, is what you discribed a SIM attack. I read a story the other day about someone who noticed his phone wasn't working one day and ended up losing a million dollars. His life savings from an IRA. The story literally scared me to the point I'm tempted to remove all financial account information from my and my wife's phone. Would that solve the problem? I don't believe my carrier has any PIN code protection you mention.
Do yourself a favor and listen to those two podcasts I posted. The snapchat thief speaks specifically to the issue of someones ability to sim swap and potentially gain access to any and every login and password you have on your phone. The iron clad resolutions to protecting against this fully are mind blowingly difficult like a different email and password for EVERY saved account, never linking your banking to your phone, and so on.

I recently swapped phones and use to have EVERYTHING on my phone. When I setup the new phone I purposely did not connect all the accounts and copy over everything to the new phone but kept the old phone, with no sim, and have access to all the accounts, app logins and so on on the old phone (via wifi only). If anything like a sim swap ever were to happen the critical accounts would not be accessible.

The scary part is large balance accounts that are not FDIC protected or protected by other means. Even with FDIC its a nightmare but at least you'll get your funds back. The balances above 250k.. yeek.