AT&T Call Center Employees Sold Customer SSNs to Black Market Cellphone Mob

A criminal entity going by the alias El Pelón (Spanish for “bald man”) provided the workers specific phone numbers and then paid for the names and Social Security numbers tied to those numbers.  Cellphone traffickers seemed to be trying to activate filched phones with the customer data.

“The personal information that employees had taken without authorization was used to submit 290,803 handset unlock requests for mobile phones through AT&T’s website,” the New York Times reports.

Investigators found that three call center employees in Mexico accessed more than 68,000 accounts without authorization, according to CNBC. Around 40 employees in the Philippines and Colombia had accessed about 211,000 customer accounts.

The F.C.C. learned of the privacy breach after AT&T reported the activity in Mexico to the California attorney general in 2014. The additional incidents in Colombia and the Philippines were not uncovered until this year, when AT&T reported them to the F.C.C.