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 tells 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, 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.
The smishing group that Smith cracked resulted in recovering data from more than 390,000 distinct credit cards.
“I thought about reaching out directly to the victims, but that would be kind of weird if some random [person] says your credit card details are stolen,” he admits. “That’s when I reached …