This Colorado couple faced a $3,700 scam nightmare on AT&T account — fraudster bought iPad, iPhone, smartwatch, 2 sets of headphones. Here’s what happened and how to protect yourself

A mess of a situation

Had the Dixons not needed help with Frank’s phone, they perhaps would’ve remained in the dark even longer about the fact that someone had stolen their account details and made expensive purchases against it. Thankfully, the store employee who helped the Dixons the day of their visit alerted them to the suspicious activity.

It turned out that all of the electronics purchased on the Dixons’ account were made on the same date, and within the same 58-minute window at two different AT&T locations. The purchaser was able to put the items they bought onto installment plans that drove up the Dixons’ monthly phone bill from around $100 to almost $450.

Despite that unusual activity, no red flag was raised by AT&T at the time.

When the Dixons learned what had happened, they contacted AT&T’s fraud department to report the problem and spent hours on the phone trying to sort things out. They then found out that their claim was denied because the company did not consider the transactions on their account unauthorized.

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Protect yourself from account takeover fraud

What happened to the Dixons was account takeover fraud, a form of identity theft. In the course of this type of fraud, a criminal accesses account information and uses it to make purchases or other transactions.

Of course, the question is, how did the criminal in question get access to the Dixons’ account? And there are a few possibilities.

Criminals can access a given account through phishing techniques, where they impersonate companies and try to get account holders to divulge personal information. As an example, you might get a call from your “bank” asking you to confirm your login, password and Social Security number. If you hand over that information, a criminal can potentially access your account and withdraw money from it.

For this reason, you should never share sensitive information like that in response to an unsolicited call, text or email. The only time you should feel comfortable sharing account information is if you call your bank or credit card company yourself. And even then, it’s rare that you’ll be asked to share your password.

Another way for criminals to take over an account is by accessing your information in a data breach. And unfortunately, there's not a ton you can do to protect yourself from that.

So what can you do to avoid landing in a similar boat to the Dixons? For one thing, make a list of your various accounts and monitor them regularly for suspicious activity. Also, aim to create a hard-to-guess password for each account you have.

Don’t share passwords across accounts. If you use the same password for your bank account, credit cards, cell phone, and more, once a criminal gets a hold of it, they can use it to access all of those accounts instead of just one. And if you're wondering how on earth you're supposed to remember all of those passwords, that's what a password manager like Bitwarden is for.

It’s also a good idea to sign up for multi-factor authentication for any account of yours that offers it. That way, you’ll have a unique, one-time code sent to your cell phone or email address each time you want to access a given account. Even if a criminal has gotten your password in a data breach, they won’t be able to get into your account if they can’t access your email or text messages.

After a harrowing experience, the Dixons eventually got the charges removed from their account by AT&T. But let this serve as a wakeup call that identity theft and account takeover fraud can happen to anyone. The more steps you take to protect yourself, the less likely you are to become a victim.