He took the ‘locked’ smartphonebound by offers from T-Mobile, and then unblocked them so that they could also be resold to customers of other telephone operators. To do this, he employed a sophisticated scheme of trickery and deception, pushing himself to use social engineering to obtain the unwitting complicity of T-Mobile employees.
The person responsible for this criminal operation – no fewer than 14 charges against him – is Argishti Khudaverdyan, former owner of a cell phone store affiliated with T-Mobile, the operator he defrauded and defrauded for years. Khudaverdyan reportedly illegally unlocked hundreds of thousands of smartphones, illegally earning more than $25 million. Money that would then be laundered in the (vain) attempt not to get caught.
What are locked smartphones
But to understand this story, we have to step back. In Italy, the concept of “locked smartphone” never really caught on, despite some attempts. Trivial because the vast majority of consumers prefer to buy smartphones from electronics stores or online.
In the US it works a little differently: buying smartphones with a phone offer from operators is very common. Americans often pay tens of dollars a month for a smartphone and a subscription that provides internet traffic and calling minutes. It also happens in Italy, but the difference is that in America smartphones taken in this way can only be used with a SIM card sold by that particular operator. So if you buy one iPhone with T-Mobile, the smartphone cannot be used with a Verizon SIM card and so on. In jargon we speak of Locked Phones.
T-Mobile scam: Khudaverdyan risks spending the rest of his life in prison
This solution allows operators to sell smartphones at a hyper-affordable price – several hundred dollars less than their list price – because they can be sure that the customer will be tied to their offers for years to come. Changing the rate plan would mean turning your smartphone into an unusable tile.
Argishti Khudaverdyan was a petty con man. In fact, the man unlocked smartphones not so much thanks to a hidden IT talent, but thanks to a series of articulated frauds against T-Mobile employees and executives.
by some phishing emails — that is, impersonating the operator’s IT department — Khudaverdyan had managed to steal the credentials of more than 50 T-Mobile employees. On one occasion, Khudaverdyan managed to convince T-Mobile’s IT department to reset all the passwords of the company’s executives. Thanks to the credentials stolen in this way, the entrepreneur could easily unlock his customers’ phones so that he could freely resell them on the black market.
The hearing is scheduled for October 17. If Argishti Khudaverdyan were found guilty on all 14 counts, he would risk having to serve more 165 years in prison.
Source: Lega Nerd
