Out of all the innovative frauds, Muhammad Fahd, a Pakistan and Grenada national, will be known for his daring approach of continued ploying even when he knew authorities were after him. Department of Justice says that Fahd who unlocked 1.9 million AT&T customers’ phones has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The story was unfolded in a news release from the DOJ where it was revealed that Muhammad Fahd approached an AT&T employee on Facebook and offered him a good amount of money in return for a favor from him that’d help Fahd unlock AT&T phones.  Unlocking the device would free customers from AT&T’s services and any additional payments associated with that.

Fahd is said to have persuaded alias Frank Zhang to bring more workers on board at its call center in Bothell, Washington in order to run a full-fledged business based on this. Customers were duped into believing that all this was authentic as Fahd cleverly set phony bank accounts, fictitious invoices, etc., giving an impression that everything was legitimate.

Learning the incidents and loopholes, AT&T established a new unlocking system in 2013 that made breaching a touch job. But man was in no mood to stop and hired a developer to sneak into AT&T’s systems and help him unlock phones more efficiently. The DOJ says, AT&T employees gave him details about the company’s systems and unlocking methods to help exploit the company. The malware deployed by Fahd & crew is said to have obtained information about the system and other AT&T employees’ access credentials, allowing the developer to further mutate the malware.

The 7-year-long saga of unlocking nearly 2 million phones cost AT&T more than $200 million dollars. Fahd was later busted in Hong Kong in 2018 and extradited to the U.S. in 2019. He was later indicted for wire fraud.

More information on victims other than AT&T still remains a mystery as no incidents on a customer data breach or additional fraud ever came to light.

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