T-Mobile caused one of its customers to lose 3/4 of a million bucks, and the guy who’s out the money is now suing the phone company, claiming its security sucked so bad, someone just up and stole his money.
Calvin Cheng claims T-Mobile violated Federal laws that impose security regulations to ensure against hacking and outright stealing.
Cheng claims he’s a customer of a company called Iterative … a hybrid investment fund focused on crypto trading. He says in 2018 T-Mobile was the victim of a SIM-swap — where a criminal third party convinces a wireless carrier to transfer access from one of its legitimate customers to a SIM-card controlled by the criminal.
Cheng alleges in 2020 … T-Mobile allowed one of these criminal third parties access to Iterative’s founder. The criminal third party, posing as the Iterative founder, convinced Cheng to send 15 Bitcoins to a digital wallet … which he believed was controlled by Iterative. He was expected to cash it in for U.S. dollars but never received them.
He seems to be pegging the price of Bitcoin at the time of the fraud at $50,000 a pop — hence the $750k in damages — although now its value has plummeted to just under $30,000 a coin.
Cheng says T-Mobile’s security lapses were a direct cause of his loss.
In addition to the $750,000, Cheng wants punitive damages and other costs.
We reached out to T-Mobile … so far, no word back.