Claro will have to assure the court that it did not make the bitcoin fraud easier. The affected party highlighted that Claro must give him money for the moral damages caused to him.
A few months ago, a resident of Brazil lost more than $34,000 worth of bitcoin (BTC) from his Binance account and filed a lawsuit against the Claro telephone company, alleging that his chip got duplicated.
The case started its development in December of last year when the Claro mobile line of the affected cell phone suddenly stopped working. When this situation took place, the man filed a complaint to customer service. And after a few days, they made portability giving him a new phone number in a physical store of the entity.
But when the case appeared to get resolved, the victim detected an unexpected event. The bitcoins he housed in his Binance account suddenly disappeared. He noticed that an individual with a mobile device based in Sao Paulo had cloned his chip and extracted all his money from the network, a figure registered at more than $34,000 worth of BTC.
The victim expressed that his chip got cloned, enabled on another cellphone, and used to extract all his cryptocurrencies. This situation indicates that the attacker could access his Binance account through the SMS password recovery that the network allows.
This type of attack gets called SIM swapping or chip duplication. It consists of someone duplicating a cell phone SIM card to receive the code that the network grants by SMS to confirm every single activity the user is about to do on the platform. This way, the scammer got into the victim’s account and withdrew all his money.
Claro has to Prove Innocence to the Court
The user sent Claro directly to the Court of Justice of the Federal District in Brazil. It alleges that a failure in providing the service caused severe damage to the bitcoin investor. He requested that the company give him at least USD 10,000 for moral damages.
Claro denied getting involved in the situation, but the court asked the company to prove that it did not make the fraudulent bitcoin procedure easier for the attacker.
In response to the lawsuit, Claro denied the request claiming that it is not to blame for the crime in Binance, and asked to get excluded from the legal procedure. However, the court judge disagreed with the company’s statements and asked that it must prove that it is not responsible for the lack of provision of the service.
The case is still open, and now Claro must prove that it did not give advantage to the criminal to commit the fraud, while Binance has not received any lawsuit from the affected party. During the last year, other users from Latin America, such as Colombia and Venezuela, have started legal action against the network for other bitcoin losses.
This situation represents the importance digital asset holders and traders should give to the security procedures to keep their currencies safe. It is always better to house digital assets in self-custody wallets outside of exchanges to circumvent these horrible situations.
By: Jenson Nuñez
