> To gain unauthorized access to T-Mobile’s protected internal computers, Khudaverdyan obtained T-Mobile employees’ credentials through various dishonest means, including sending phishing emails that appeared to be legitimate T-Mobile correspondence, and socially engineering the T-Mobile IT Help Desk. Khudaverdyan used the fraudulent emails to trick T-Mobile employees to log in with their employee credentials so he could harvest the employees’ information and fraudulently unlock the phones.
> Working with others in overseas call centers, Khudaverdyan also received T‑Mobile employee credentials which he then used to access T-Mobile systems to target higher-level employees by harvesting those employees’ personal identifying information and calling the T-Mobile IT Help Desk to reset the employees’ company passwords, giving him unauthorized access to the T-Mobile systems which allowed him to unlock and unblock cellphones.
Does anyone know how much he was selling unlocks for? I'm shocked that he brought in $25 million doing this.
The Wayback machine shows that one of his website also advertised AT&T and Sprint unlocks: https://web.archive.org/web/20171203060414/http://www.unlock... I'm assuming he was also phishing those employees, but they just haven't sued him yet.
EDIT: There's a lot of misinformation about unlocking in this thread. US carriers have been required to provide unlocking services for phones since 2014 after the 1-year payback period is up ( https://www.fcc.gov/general/cell-phone-unlocking#:~:text=Car.... ). Locked cell phones were usually sold at a discount or via promotions with the locking used as a way to enforce recoupment of the subsidy. Back then, you could often buy an unlocked version of the phone at a higher retail price because it wasn't subsidized. That's mostly disappeared now and phones aren't really subsidized the same way much any more.