Reversing the Cyber-Crime Paradigm: The “Cyber-Robin Hood”

An Orange County, Fla. family says a hacker breached their phone and Netflix accounts to pay off the family’s bills.

The Hennigs discovered the sorta well-meaning hack when AT&T alerted Kathy Hennig that she owed $1,300 because the card listed for her account was a stolen credit card.

Kathy learned that the same card was being used on her Netflix account when she received an alert indicating the card had expired. When she asked to know the last four digits of the card, Netflix gave her the exact sequence of the stolen card used for the phone account.

“There’s no other person in my situation where somebody compromised my account changed the credit cards and started paying my bills, there’s no such thing,” Hennig said.

Hennig says the only other information she has about what went down is that the two hacked accounts are linked to the same email and the accounts were switched at about the same time.

When Hennig called AT&T to try to clear up the switcheroo, she was banned from using a credit card to pay off her cellphone account ever again.

“It blows my mind,” she says. “It makes me look like such a liar because why would someone hack into an account just to get a stranger to pay the bill?”

Hennig has a long history with the phone company and a pristine credit history.

News 6 investigator Mike Holfeld contacted AT&T spokeswoman Rosie Montalvo and in less than 24 hours, the company agreed to remove the credit card ban.

Montalvo says AT&T has never seen a case like this before.

Read the Original Article at NextGov