Pakistani Man Bribed AT&T Insiders to Plant Malware and Unlock 2 Million Phones
Aug 06, 2019
United States federal government has charged a Pakistani national for bribing employees at AT&T telecommunication company over a period of five years to help unlock more than 2 million phones and plant malware on the company's network. Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, was arrested in Hong Kong last year in February at the request of the U.S. government and just extradited to the U.S. on Friday, August 2, 2019. According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders working at a call center in Bothell, Washington, more than $1 million in bribes between 2012 and 2017 to help them unlock cell phones associated with specified IMEI numbers that otherwise were not eligible to be removed from AT&T's network. Some telecommunication companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, sell flagship phones at discounted prices, but it comes with locked SIMs that prevent users from switching their network service for any
