Ask Lemmy

Hardware is good, but why not have both?

Imei Blacklisting makes them not very valuable anyways. Data worth a lot more.

Btw someone got a fradulent copy of my mother's ID somehow. Like not a "fake id", an actual real government issued ID, but fraudulently obtained mailed to some random address. They started trying to access money in banks, then tried sim swapping [edit: The sim swapping actually worked. Calls from my mother's phone stopped working and other lines in the same family plan got a notification, so my parents went to the phone company and removed my mother's name from the account and replaced the sim. As for the bank accounts, they closed and reopened the accounts with new account numbers and they had a note in there to double check the picture (which is still of my mother's) and address on there (which the fradulent ID had a different address). They never managed to take any money. But it wasted a lot of time.]

So like, its a thing that happens. People think "identity theft won't happen to me, I'm not important enough", then someone steals your identity. These things never gets investigated. They said "we'll investigate" but like a year later, not a word from those "investigators".Only if you steal from the rich do any investigation gets done. They don't care about the average person.

TLDR: Protect your data. Identity theft is actually common.