A California man named Argishti Khudaverdyan has been indicted for using illegal credentials to unlock “hundreds of thousands of phones” between August 2014 and June 2019.
A jury found the “hacker” guilty this week. According to a U.S. Department of Justice announcement and an indictment filed earlier this year, Khudaverdyan made about $25 million by hacking into T-Mobile’s systems to unlock the carrier’s contract phones and run them as a gray-market business.
Khudaverdyan faces a minimum of two years in prison and a maximum of 165 years for aggravated identity fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, and unauthorized access to computer systems, among other charges, and his sentencing hearing is scheduled for October 17.
According to reports, the 44-year-old man was initially (in 2017) the owner of a T-Mobile store called Top Tier Solutions Inc in the Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles, but that little profit did not satisfy him. A few months later, T-Mobile terminated the store’s contract due to “suspicious behavior”.
Prosecutors say he used unauthorized access to T-Mobile to find ways to illegally unlock the carrier’s contract phones and market his illegal unlocking services through emails, brokers and various websites, thus earning $25 million in illegal proceeds from customers.
The U.S. Department of Justice said he obtained the credentials of more than 50 carrier employees, including through phishing emails, and used them to unlock phones from “Sprint, AT&T and other carriers.
To attract customers, he also falsely claimed it was an “official unlocking service” from T-Mobile and unlocked hundreds of thousands of phones, including iPhones, over a period of time from 2014 through 2019.
What’s even more disgraceful is that he even had the audacity to “unlock” stolen or lost phones on the black market for people with a profit motive.
As we all know, carrier contract phones are subsidized, so they are cheaper than barebones, but you need to buy a contract phone to guarantee a certain number of years of use on the network to prevent it from switching to a competitor (or reselling hardware) before the contract expires, thus causing a loss of business for the original carrier.
