"T-Mobile Retailer Guilty of $25m Fraud Scheme"

The former owner of a T-Mobile store, Argishti Khudaverdyan, 44, of Burbank, has been found guilty of a multimillion-dollar scheme to illegally unlock and unblock mobile devices.  Khudaverdyan was found guilty of 14 federal charges, including wire fraud, accessing a computer to defraud and obtain value, intentionally accessing a computer without authorization to obtain information, money laundering, and aggravated identity theft.  It was noted that between August 2014 to June 2019, Khudaverdyan fraudulently unlocked and unblocked devices on the T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T networks.  The Department of Justice (DoJ) stated that this enabled the phones to be sold on the black market and for users to stop using T-Mobile services.  The DoJ also said that from January to June 2017, Khudaverdyan also ran Top Tier Solutions, a T-Mobile store based in Eagle Rock.  After his contract was terminated due to suspicious behavior, he continued with the fraud scheme.  To continue the fraud scheme, he phished for T-Mobile employee log-ins or socially engineered the firm’s IT help desk to access T-Mobile’s internal computer systems.  On other occasions, he worked with individuals in overseas call centers to obtain employee credentials which he then used to access systems and harvest information on higher-level staff.  The DoJ noted that this info could be used with the help desk to reset passwords and provide privileged access.  The DoJ said that Khudaverdya and his co-conspirators compromised the accounts of 50 different T-Mobile USA employees in this way and unlocked and unblocked hundreds of thousands of phones, making $25m in the process.

Infosecurity reports: "T-Mobile Retailer Guilty of $25m Fraud Scheme"