Ex-AT&T employees secretly unlocked ‘hundreds of thousands’ of phones in 2013

If you wanted to unlock an AT&T phone in 2013, Swift Unlocks had you covered.

Consumers are legally allowed to request that their carrier unlock their phones – once they’ve been paid off in full – so that the phone can then be connected to a competing carrier’s network. Purportedly, Swift Unlocks was offering employees $2,000 every two weeks and all they had to do was install a malware bug on their work computer.

The representatives used malicious software running on the employee computers in the AT&T store to automatically request unlocks. AT&T claims a third employee, Nguyen Lam, participated, but does not allege he was paid. Otherwise, the phone simply won’t work on another network.

“Locking” phones into a single carrier allows service providers like Verizon, AT&T or Sprint to guarantee that their customers will stay for the duration of their contract (or at least force them to pay off the cost of the phone if they should break said contract). The Swift Unlocks team then apparently ran a program that generated the unlock codes using the service reps’ credentials.

The malware allowed commands to be issued from a remote, unauthorized server and used “valid customer service personnel identification numbers” to process automated unlock requests without proper authorization, AT&T wrote.

AT&T has taken action against an alleged scheme that ultimately unlocked thousands of AT&T smartphones that were still under contract. It offers to unlock AT&T devices, from Apple’s iPhone to Amazon’s Fire Phone, for between $10 and $50.

The defendants have not yet filed a response with the court. It claims that 50 “John Doe Defendants” helped develop the unlocking software.

There are multiple websites that sell these kinds of services under the Swift Unlocks moniker, including swiftunlocks.com.

As GeekWire reports, Sapatin, one of the three employees involved with the scheme, also tried to recruit a fourth, bragging that this scheme includes many people across the country, including other carriers outside AT&T. The company is asking for damages and requesting a jury trial.

“We’re seeking damages and injunctive relief from several people who engaged in a scheme a couple of years ago to illegally unlock wireless telephones used on our network”, AT&T spokesperson Seth Bloom told Motherboard, adding that “it’s important to note that this did not involve any improper access of customer information, or any adverse effect on our customers”.