The Superior court of California has settled a SIM swapping case in favour of cryptocurrency investor and business tycoon Michael Terpin. He is rewarded with $75.8 billion as the settlement by the court as stated by Reuters on 10th May.
Terpin has also filed a case against AT& T citing that their negligence has led to cryptocurrency theft of $24 million in 2017. Later reviewing into the episode, Nicholas Truglia was perceived as the cheat who was purportedly associated with six additional identical theft cases. The amount taken from Terpin was the maximum.
The court has ordered Nicholas Truglia to compensate Terpin $75.8 million for damage correction and compensation as reported by Reuters citing the court documents. Truglia was caught after he sent a personal text to his friend, in the message he said he was a billionaire and had 100 BTC. The message was sent just after the reported theft.
Later his friend also confirmed that he had a lavish life with sports cars, Rolex watches, and private jets.
Terpin has told Reuter, he had filled a civil complaint after his three million crypto tokens were stolen from the wallet through a SIM swapping last year. In SIM swap, the phone number of an individual gets stolen by a hacker, and he gets access to the inbound data on the number.
Truglia and his associates had transferred the phone number of Terpin to a phone which they operate and changed the password of his online accounts and stole the cryptocurrencies. Truglia was under arrest for six additional SIM Swap cases in 2018.
Terpin has also sued the telecom company AT&T for their negligence in protecting his cell phone information and letting the criminals gain control over which phone number. He was under the high-risk protection category of the company still his information got compromised twice.
Terpin may have won the case against Truglia, but his war against AT&T is still on.
It seems the SIM swapping method is gaining popularity among the crypto criminals to get access to victims’ crypto wallet. And the telecom companies are not doing their part of work completely to protect their customers. Allegations were filed against AT&T and T mobile in Silver Miller a US-based law firm on behalf of the victim whose data got compromised using SIM swapping.
A group of six individuals was also accused by the US Department of justice citing they had robbed cryptocurrencies using SIM swap.