Cybersecurity expert Grant Smith wasn’t about to let it slide when scammers tried bilking his wife through a phony U.S. Postal Service text.
“I took it personally,” Smith told PEOPLE in an interview. “At first, I was emotionally invested, and then it kind of switched into more curiosity.”
Smith, the 23-year-old founder and president of Phantom Security Group in Andover, Mass., made it his mission to track down the group responsible for tricking his “very, very smart” and tech-savvy wife into releasing her personal information through a “smishing” scheme, in which fraudsters use fake messages to dupe people out of their personal information.
He handed his findings over to the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and an unnamed U.S. bank. The smishing group that Smith cracked resulted in recovering data from more than 390,000 distinct credit cards.
Smith recently came on the Cybercrime Magazine Podcast to tell us the whole story.