Customer trust in T-Mobile eroded by a recent revelation

The document was brought to light by law firm Greenberg Glusker, which had won $33 million from T-Mobile in its case against the company. The document details the carrier’s inaction and oversight that made a SIM swap attack on customer Joseph “Josh” Jones successful.

We asked our readers if the details of the case shook their confidence in T-Mobile, and an overwhelming majority indicated that they did not trust the company. That was to be expected, given that the court concluded that despite increased unauthorised SIM swapping incidents in 2018 and 2019, T-Mobile didn’t implement measures that could have stopped attackers from swindling Jones out of $37 million worth of cryptocurrency.

T-Mobile’s inaction was bound to harm customers, the court suggested.

We got 3915 responses. Nearly 41 percent, or 1602 of the respondents, said that they had already lost confidence in T-Mobile before the court made its findings public. In addition to SIM swap attacks, which involve accessing T-Mobile‘s internal systems and deceiving or bribing employees to get their help, the carrier has also been hacked multiple times. Therefore, it’s not surprising that many customers already didn’t have faith in T-Mobile.

Nearly 52 percent, or 2028 customers, said that the recent development eroded their confidence in T-Mobile. While customers of other carriers have also been the target of SIM swap attacks, T-Mobile is more culpable because it was singled out by cybercriminals as an easier target. That’s because the company had weaker defenses, and its employees received little training to recognize and thwart SIM swap attempts.

Only 7 percent, or 285 of the customers, were unmoved by the revelations, as T-Mobile has since taken steps to fend off attacks. For instance, the company changed how SIM swaps were approved and deployed advanced network Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for Number Verification and SIM Swap.

Our findings suggest that restoring trust isn’t an easy job, especially because the incidents are recent enough to still be fresh in the memory of T-Mobile customers. T-Mobile will need to regain trust by ensuring such security lapses don’t happen again, and by fixing problems quickly when something does go awry.

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