MTN ****

On Wednesday 17th March 2020, I received a telephone call at 19h22 from an individual stating that he was from MTN and advising me that I had requested a sim swap. I advised that I had never requested a sim swap and within minutes my airtime was ****** and this was detected by the numerous sms messages which were hitting my phone within minutes of receiving the call. Attempts to halt this invasion and theft of my airtime were futile and since I have installed True Caller on my device, I was able to track the telephone numbers used. Of more concern, was the number that originated the call and incepted my airtime, had all the MTN prompts available when dialling this number although it does not appear to be an MTN telephone number. Furthermore, the transactions also revealed the cellular number to which the airtime and transactions had been moved to and after attempting to make contact with this individual, it was constantly not available. Managed to get hold of a MTN service controller who was helpful and assisted but unfortunately, it was too late to halt this malicious **** and the airtime has gone. What is of great concern, is how do these individuals who **** people manage to provide a realistic voice activated facility pretending to be the actual service provider when in fact they are the actual ******** involved in ********** activities. What protection do service providers viz. MTN, Vodacom and other cellular service providers have in place to prevent this type of behaviour and protect their customers. Feel pretty silly for having answered the phone in the first place and this has definitely reminded me that my gut feel of not trusting people is the correct way to go which is rather sad since we are living in such hard times at present.