Technology has been quite a godsend for fraudsters. In the past, if you wanted to recreate a valuable painting you needed to painstakingly paint it, or if you wanted to open a fraudulent bank account, you had to physically grow a moustache to fool a bank teller. But these days, it's much easier. To beat two-factor authentication, scammers can simply transfer your phone number to a new SIM card and gain access to every penny you own.
This comparatively new crime is called "SIM-jacking". It works like this: perpetrators obtain important details about their victims either by searching social media or conning them into revealing personal information. Using these details, they pretend to be their victims, convincing network providers to transfer their phone numbers to new SIM cards and post out those SIMs. Once the switch is complete, messages containing codes for the two-factor authentication systems many of us now have can be intercepted, and fraudsters can log in to your email, social media or mobile banking accounts.
