My phone got SIM swap hacked without me clicking on any links, just a reminder to be careful

Just to preface myself, I’ve been in crypto since back during the Wild West of 2016-17 when scams were outrageously abundant. I don’t click random links, I have web protection software, I am paranoid to the max so I made my my accounts a pain in the ass to send any crypto out. Also for every account on my 2FA security I add I also add a lot of dummy codes.

The two pictures I added shows the distraction that allowed the hacker enough time to convince customer support they were me. Which allowed them to transfer all of my information onto a new sim and on a completely different phone while effectively shutting off services to my current phone.

Here’s the story, it was about about 8pm at night scrolling through Reddit and I started getting like an abundance of texts, I’m talking within 10min I had received over 100 texts and within 30min it was a ridiculous amount I couldn’t event count. All stuff that had nothing to do with me or apps I’ve never signed up for. Somewhere in the middle of all of these texts I had put my phone down. I was so annoyed I just couldn’t deal with all the notifications. These slimy people had sent the verification text to transfer sim accounts in the middle of these 100’s of texts and I had 10 minutes to respond before they automatically did the sim swap. When I realized what was going on I had already been 100% comprised. I used my wife’s phone to call customer support and stop what was happening BOOM her phone goes down too. I’m sitting here thinking oh my god this person is going to somehow get all of my crypto. (I have it all on a ledger). I had some silly short term crypto on my Coinbase and some other platforms. I was also very concerned about all of my personal info.

Luckily I have an iPad with cell service and I was able to check my accounts. Unluckily I was already locked out of every single one of them. Since it was so late, stores were obviously closed so I couldn’t go in an do it manually.

Next step was pure panic mode.

Step after that was to FaceTime audio my wife’s mom (I can only FaceTime with other iPhones from my iPad I couldn’t call customer support from it) so she put her phone on speaker while she used my wife’s dads phone on speaker to call customer support and we could talk to them.

After 3 hours on the phone we were able to reverse all sim activity to normal and lock the account. In the morning we were able to go into an actual store and have a lock and more security measures put on our phones.

After changing my email passwords and getting control back after they had been changed I was able to log into my investment platforms.. completely prepared to have lost everything, and not a single thing had been sent out. Someone was trying to send out everything but they couldn’t because they couldn’t figure out my 2FA code. It’s buried in a ton of fake codes and only I know which one is which. Everything on my ledger was fine. I was so happy, relieved, blessed.

I just want to share this with my fellow crypto investors. Scams and schemes are evolving everyday. Be prepared, stay safe. Lock your accounts down!!

TLDR; Phone sim swapped, swapper(hacker) had basic info of mine and was able to convince customer support they were me and were able to transfer everything on my phone to theirs. Set up extra measures that seemed unnecessary but turned out to be necessary. Grammar, and or, wording might be a little wonky it was a long write up lol