I just listened to ThePrimeagen talk about “Meta’s Crime Empire,” and there was a number I can’t unhear:
10% of Facebook’s 2024 ad revenue—$16 billion—came from scams.
Not indirectly. Not accidentally.
Directly. From scam ads.
An internal team investigated, escalated the worst offenders, and presented them all the way up the chain.
Leadership looked at the findings…
…and kept many of the scam ads running.
Because they did a cost–benefit analysis and realized something horrifying:
They make more money from scams than they would lose from fines.
If that doesn’t tell you everything about the incentives of big tech platforms, nothing will.
And it hit me because just a few months earlier, I learned how fragile the rest of the system is too—especially the pieces we rely on to prove we are who we say we are.
I learned that the hard way in August.
The day everything broke at once
On the same day everything went sideways, my wife’s phone suddenly switched into SOS mode. No service. No calls. Nothing.
She got a text minutes earlier saying changes had been made to her Verizon account.
“Probably spam,” I told her.
Then I got the same text.
Then her phone just dropped off the network entirely.
It all happened within a five-minute window.
I called Verizon, only to get trapped in a thirty-minute automated AI hellscape that refused to connect me to an actual human. If my wife had been alone, I don’t even know what she would’ve done—the phone was bricked, we don’t have a landline, and our entire emergency infrastructure runs through a single device that can be taken over in minutes.
It’s terrifying how fragile that is.
By the time I reached a human, they treated me like I was the criminal. Endless verification checks. Confusion. Disbelief. And then the moment where one support rep finally realized what had happened:
Someone had taken over my wife’s SIM.
They fed me a lot of nonsense along the way—stuff that maybe works on most people but doesn’t work on someone who actually understands technology. I bit my tongue. Step one was getting her phone working again. Step two was figuring out how the hell this happened.
Thirty minutes later, the line finally reactivated.
That’s when things got weird.
“Someone in a Verizon store did this.”
“No wait… they didn’t.”
“Actually, hold on.”
I asked, repeatedly:
How did this happen?
I’ve opened devices on my account before. I’ve added lines. I’ve fixed SIM issues. I know their protocols. I’ve had to show:
- two forms of ID
- a text-based PIN
- confirmation from another device
- physical device verification
So how did someone:
- add a device,
- swap a SIM,
- take over a line,
- and bypass two-factor authentication
…without any of that?
The first rep couldn’t answer.
She escalated me.
The second rep initially said it looked like a physical store in Edison, NJ initiated the SIM swap.
Then he said, no, it actually came from the website.
Then he said he wasn’t sure.
Then he said something that made my stomach drop:
“It looks like your Verizon Wireless account was hacked.”
At this point, I’m thinking:
What good is two-factor authentication if there’s a path into the account that doesn’t require it?
His solution?
Deactivate my entire Verizon account and build a new one from scratch.
I still don’t understand why. It felt like wiping evidence more than fixing anything.
Another thirty minutes of resetting PINs, re-verifying devices, re-establishing lines.
When it was all done, I asked again:
How did this happen?
He didn’t know.
He told me even he had his SIM stolen the year before.
Great.
And then the credit cards started arriving
A couple days later, I get an alert:
Someone opened a credit card card in my name.
Then two store cards arrive in the mail.
Then an airline card.
None of them had charges, which almost made it creepier.
What was the play?
Why open cards if they’re being sent to my house?
I spent hours calling:
- Discover
- Synchrony
- Comenity
- Chase
- whoever else manages all these store cards
Then the fraud investigator told me I needed to file a police report to lock down my credit properly.
So I called the non-emergency line.
Two officers came to my house.
We sat at my dining room table and filled out a full identity-theft report, listing every fraudulent card.
The whole time, two things kept circling in my head:
- Did the Verizon breach enable the credit card applications?
- If the cards weren’t being used, what on earth was the attacker actually after?
No one had an answer.
Not Verizon.
Not the card issuers.
Not the investigator.
Not even the police.
All they said was this happens all the time. Reassuring.
And here’s the part I still can’t shake
This all happened right when I started applying for jobs.
The same week I began uploading my resume to platforms I hadn’t used in years.
The same week recruiters I didn’t know started DMing me.
The same week I began submitting my personal information into dozens of portals, many of which are known to be:
- full of ghost jobs
- full of scraped listings
- full of dead postings kept online for brand perception
- full of fake jobs used to harvest resumes
And after learning about the sheer scale of scams on platforms like Facebook…
after experiencing firsthand how brittle and insecure the identity systems are at major telecoms…
I can’t shake this question:
Did job hunting make me vulnerable?
I don’t know.
No one does.
That’s the scariest part.
The people running these systems don’t know either—and based on their incentives, I’m not sure they’re all that interested in finding out.