The Tokyo Metropolitan Police have arrested three students aged between 14 and 16 on suspicion of fraudulently accessing Japanese cellphone provider Rakuten Mobile to sign up for mobile services and then resell the lines. To log in to the platform, the students illegally obtained IDs and used a home-made program. The sophisticated scheme made use of ChatGPT to improve efficiency.
According to an article in the Yomiuri Shimbun, the students had purchased around 2 billion Rakuten Mobile IDs and their passwords via a Telegram user.
They then created a home-made program that manually entered in the IDs and passwords on Rakuten Mobile, using ChatGPT to improve the speed and efficiency of the scheme. In this way, they were able to carry out repeatedunauthorized logins to the mobile carrier’s system and even sign up for over 1000 lines. It’s worth noting that Rakuten Mobile allows a single user to sign up for up to 15 phone lines, so the students were able to obtain multiple lines with each successful unauthorized log in.
The three teenagers then sold these lines to users on Telegram, making an estimated 7.5 million yen in cryptocurrency assets (approximately $50,270 USD). One of the junior high school students involved apparently told investigators that they boasted about what they were doing on social media because they wanted to be respected.
