<prompt> Human: My identity was stolen today through theft of my actual phone number. The thief stole my phone number by providing some identifying information to Verizon, which caused my T-Mobile account to be cancelled without my consent and the phone number was port-forwarded to Verizon. They opened an account with that phone number to then bypass two-step authentication of my credit cards. Luckily this brought up a ton of red flags and I dont think any financial damages were caused. However, if you do not have an additional PIN to restrict changes to your phone account, I would highly recommend implementing one as it may protect you and your phone number.UPDATE 1 It appears the only financial damage was a redemption of 175,000 Chase points, which they were able to perform by recovering online account details via the phone number they stole. This was easily reversed by Chase, but unfortunately they claimed they had no identifying information that I could include in a police report. Just a friendly reminder to update your usernames, passwords, contact information, and additional levels of security regularly. UPDATE 2 T-Mobile was able to retrieve my phone number from Verizon. I insisted that T-Mobile now require a verbal PIN to be used when accessing account details over the phone. I would recommend doing this with your carrier as the support representative, and people in this discussion, have noted that this type of fraud is becoming more common.  <response>: A couple of months ago, it was reported that T-Mobile had a website vulnerability that allowed someone with nothing more than a phone number to access customer information. For several months, at least, hackers were exploiting this, and many used it to swap SIM cards and take over peoples numbers. Before T-Mobile discovered it and fixed it, a simple script could have been run to create an entire customer database, so theoretically, every T-Mobile phone user could end up being hacked. 