On Monday, US District Court has issued summons to the former AT&T employees as well as the unlocking company Swift Unlocks and gave them 21 days to respond to the filing. After unlocking, the devices would be able to work with any other wireless carrier. Sapatin and Evans would be paid at least $10,000 by the company between April and October of 2013, according to Prashant Vira, who operates Swift Unlocks, so long as they agreed to install a remote access tool, which would allow Swift Unlocks to instantaneously have access to any unlock code.
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AT&T has taken action against an alleged scheme that ultimately unlocked thousands of AT&T smartphones that were still under contract. The website asks for a select fee to unlock certain line of devices and carriers though AT&T is questioning how Swift Unlock was able to obtain these codes.
The carrier says a company called Swift Unlocks collaborated with AT&T employees Marc Sapatin, Nguyen Lam, and Kyra Evans while they worked in an AT&T call center in Washington in 2013.
Unlocking your own phone or to pay someone to unlock your phone is legal, but are not obligated to unlock them. It is an easy way for AT&T employees to make a little extra money on the side, since there is no shortage of people wanting to unlock their phones.
For his part, Lam was not given financial compensation, though AT&T alleges he installed malware on AT&T computers.
The malware allowed instructions to be issued from a distant, unauthorized server and used “legitimate customer support personnel identification numbers” to course of automated unlock requests with out correct authorization, AT&T wrote.
Upon investigation, the company discovered that the logins and passwords of two employees at a center in Washington were responsible for a large number of the requests and those requests happened within milliseconds of each other. It claims that 50 “John Doe Defendants” helped develop the unlocking software.
The defendants have not yet filed a response with the court. One supposedly tried to recruit a coworker, promising $2,000 every two weeks for simply clicking a malicious link that would do the rest of the dirty work.
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A spokesman for AT&T contacted GeekWire and wished to emphasize that this scheme did not put private customer information at risk.
