How to earn $25 million by unlocking smartphones?
It sounds unbelievable, but the fact is, there are cases where individuals earn large sums from unlocking. Let's look at the real story.
A story about Americans who were engaged in unlocking devices from the T-Mobile operator made a noise on the network. They turned out to be Argishti Khudaverdyan and Alen Garekhbaglu, who were co-owners of the Top Tier Solutions store and had a cooperation agreement with T-Mobile. So, using his official position, Argishti cheated with other people's credentials and was engaged in illegal unlocking of phones from the T-Mobile operator.
According to the operator's company, they block lost devices to protect them from resale, after which such a phone will not work with SIM cards from other operators. But Khudaverdyan, in the period from 2014 to 2019, provided services to illegally bypass the established blocking.
The situation became possible because this businessman, being a co-owner of Top Tier Solutions, had access to T-Mobile unlocking tools through his own account. Later, T-Mobile officially terminated the cooperation agreement with these entrepreneurs due to their "suspicious" activity. To avoid risks, the operator's software was moved with the closure of all access. Nevertheless, Khudaverdyan managed to continue his activities for some time.
Incredibly, he was convincingly able to convince T-Mobile's IT department to give him the passwords and credentials of about 50 employees that were used to access the T-Mobile database over Wi-Fi. After blocking access, they "extracted" new access from T-Mobile employees through phishing and social engineering fraudulent methods. Alen Garekhbaglu, in turn, was responsible for the "promotion" of services on various forums, websites, and in closed groups.
As a result of the trial, the US jury found Argishti Khudaverdyan guilty. During his "work" he managed to earn more than $25 million dollars, buy expensive real estate and other luxury items. As a result, he faces a prison term of up to 165 years!
The next time you open a price list for unlocking devices, if you see prices there that look too "high", think about what the conditional "Alena Garehbagli" is risking by accepting your order. It is also the answer to the question - "why is the service not available?" and "when will she appear?".
And we will continue to track interesting events from the world of unlocking and will share with you interesting information on this topic.