SIM swap: how a phone number stops being yours
Nothing is hacked. The number is moved by the company that owns it, on a request that looked legitimate — and your phone losing signal is the only warning you get.
Section
Digital Safety
Accounts, passwords, recovery and the first hour after something goes wrong.
A deepfake call is no longer easy to spot
Faces and voices are synthesised live from material already public. The visual tells are disappearing — the behavioural ones are not, and neither is calling back on a number you already had.
Screen sharing is remote access with better manners
The request sounds smaller than what it grants — and one familiar-looking prompt turns being watched into being operated.
Your recovery options are the real password
Account takeovers rarely start with a guessed password. They start with a recovery email or phone number nobody had checked in years — and the change is designed not to be noticed.
SMS codes, authenticator apps, passkeys: which actually stops account takeover
All three are called two-factor authentication and they are not equivalent. Two of them can be phished in real time; one cannot, for a structural reason worth understanding.
Questions this section answers
- What is the first sign of a SIM swap?
- Sudden and complete loss of mobile service where coverage is normally fine, often with a No SIM or Invalid SIM message. Slow data is a network problem; no network at all on a working phone is not.Answered in SIM swap: how a phone number stops being yours