Court Sentences Man Who Unlocked 1.9 Million Phones

The US Department of Justice has sentenced a Pakistani citizen Muhammad Fahd who unlocked 1.9 million AT&T phones to 12 years in prison.

According to the Department of Justice, Fahd continued the seven-year scheme to defraud the company even after learning of an investigation against him. At his sentencing hearing, Judge Robert S. Lasnik said he committed a “terrible cybercrime over an extended period,” with AT&T said to have lost $201,497,430.94 (₦82,962,537,240.93) as a result.

Fahd, 35 was arrested in Hong Kong in 2018 following a 2017 indictment. He contacted an AT&T employee through Facebook in 2012 using the alias “Frank Zhang,” and bribed them to help him unlock customers' phones with "significant sums of money," the DOJ said. He recruited and bribed AT&T employees to use their AT&T credentials to unlock phones for ineligible customers. Later in the conspiracy, Fahd had the bribed employees to install custom malware and hacking tools that allowed him to unlock phones remotely from Pakistan. In September 2020, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Fahd instructed the recruited employees to set up fake businesses and bank accounts for those businesses, to receive payments and to create fictitious invoices for every deposit made into the fake businesses’ bank accounts to create the appearance that the money was payment for genuine services.

In 2013, AT&T rolled out a system that made it more difficult for the employees to unlock IMEIs. Fahd then recruited an engineer to build malware that would be installed on AT&T's systems to help him unlock phones more efficiently and remotely. The DOJ says the employees gave Fahd details about the company's systems and unlocking methods to aid that process. The malware is said to have obtained information about the system and other AT&T employees' access credentials. The developer used those details to modify the malware.

AT&T’s forensic analysis shows the total number of cellular telephones fraudulently unlocked by members of the scheme was 1,900,033 phones. AT&T has further determined that the loss it suffered because customers, whose cellular phones were illegally unlocked, failed to complete payments for their cellular telephones.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew Friedman and Francis Franze-Nakamura of the Western District of Washington and Senior Counsel Anthony Teelucksingh of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section.