WiZink and Lowi, sentenced to return 4,047 euros to a client defrauded by a duplicate of his SIM card

WiZink Bank and Vodafone-Lowi have been sentenced to pay 4,047.91 euros to a client of the banking entity whom This amount was stolen through ‘SIM swapping’fraud consisting of obtaining a duplicate of your SIM card to access your banking applications and carry out transactions.

The head of the Court of First Instance number 44 of Madrid fully estimates in a sentence lat the request of the affected person and declares the liability of WiZink Bank for failure to fulfill its obligations and of Vodafone-Lowi.

According to the ruling, “the negligence and non-compliance of the co-defendants, without it being possible to distinguish percentages of fault,” gave rise to the damage caused to the plaintifffor which they must respond jointly. In this sense, it points out that “without portability, there could be no access to WiZink and without WiZink’s failure to comply with the authentication measures to which it is legally required, the fraudulent provisions could not occur.”

I was traveling abroad

The plaintiff, when I was traveling abroaddetected movements that he had not made in accounts with another entity and contacted his operator, who told him that in the previous days the portability of the line he had with them to Lowi, a subsidiary of Vodafone, had been carried out. The mobile line was linked to bank accounts and payment methods.

The client was alerted by the entity in which it detected the creation of a payroll account and the transfer to this of amounts that he had in another, since he received emails, but not the movements that were made with the cards he had with WiZink, which he did not send emails and he could not see the mobile messages because the telephone line had been usurped.

Through the two cards he had with WiZink, the plaintiff was charged 1,048.35 euros, 2,500 euros and 499.56 euros. For the judge, Lowi has really lax requirements to process portability and issue duplicate SIM cards, allowing it to be sent to any postal address and received by anyone.

In the case of WiZink, it says that it allows changing credentials only with the DNI and since the associated telephone line was no longer managed by the plaintiff, the fraudsters were able to change the access codes and divert amounts, upon receiving the codes to carry out the operations on the telephone.

The ruling considers that, even if the fraud was carried out with a duplicate SIMthe banking entity is also responsible for not having deployed all the measures or having responded to the plaintiff’s first claims.