O2 was tricked into transferring my number to fraudsters. Could I have it back?
O2 was tricked into transferring my number to fraudsters. Could I have it back?
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‘Sim-swap’ fraud has affected three readers – and dealing with their mobile phone company hasn’t been easy. What some O2 customers may have wanted for Christmas was a phone number, since long-cherished ones have had a habit of going astray. Whether they got lucky is another matter, as O2’s customer services can be as hard to pin down as Lord Lucan.
![[Anna Tims]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2018/01/08/Anna_Tims,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
JD’s number was taken from her when fraudsters, pretending be her, tricked O2 into transferring it to a sim they’d acquired from another provider. This enabled them to receive texts, including two-factor authentication codes sent by banks to verify that a customer is who they say they are. As a result, more than £4,500 was promptly stolen from her credit card. O2 explained she had been a victim of “sim-swap fraud”, where criminals transfer your phone number to their sim to receive your calls and texts – including those from banks.
It promised to block her stolen number and dispatch a new card. This arrived and JD’s phone sprang back into life – but only for a few hours. Unbelievably, fraudsters managed, once again, to divert the number to their own sim. O2 admitted it had failed to flag the first sim-swap as fraud, which meant the second was waved through unquestioned.
JD says she was repeatedly told that the fraud team would contact her, but they did not. When, five days later, she managed to get hold of them, they had closed the case. Compensation was not due, she was told, because O2 had done nothing wrong. By then, she had been without a working phone for nearly two weeks. Her bank refunded the stolen £4,500, but she was unable to access any of her bank accounts because she could not receive the required security codes to log in.
