[Tony T]

For anyone using digital currency:
NYT: Identity Thieves Hijack Cellphone Accounts to Go After Virtual Currency

In a growing number of online attacks, hackers have been calling up Verizon, T-Mobile U.S., Sprint and AT&T and asking them to transfer control of a victim’s phone number to a device under the control of the hackers.

The attackers appear to be focusing on anyone who talks on social media about owning virtual currencies or anyone who is known to invest in virtual currency companies, such as venture capitalists. And virtual currency transactions are designed to be irreversible.

The vulnerability of phone numbers is the unintended consequence of a broad push in the security industry to institute a practice, known as two-factor authentication, that is supposed to help make accounts more secure.
Many email providers and financial firms require customers to tie their online accounts to phone numbers, to verify their identity.
But this system also generally allows someone with the phone number to reset the passwords on these accounts without knowing the original passwords. A hacker just hits “forgot password?” and has a new code sent to the commandeered phone.

Mr. Perklin and other people who have investigated recent hacks said the assailants generally succeeded by delivering sob stories about an emergency that required the phone number to be moved to a new device — and by trying multiple times until a gullible agent was found.

Coinbase, one of the most widely used Bitcoin wallets, has encouraged customers to disconnect their mobile phones from their Coinbase accounts.

“Coinbase looks like a bank, stores millions of dollars like a bank, but you don’t realize how weak its default protections are until you are robbed of thousands of dollars in minutes,” said Cody Brown, a virtual reality developer who was hacked in May.

The irreversibility of Bitcoin transactions has often been lauded as one of the most important qualities of virtual currency because it makes it harder for banks and governments to intervene in transactions.

.