How easy is it to get hacked?

The below incident happened to me and is true

Other day I was getting back to my office from lunch break and my phone rang, the number that popped up was a 1-800 number. I usually ignore these kinds of calls, but to my bad luck I answered. The caller on other side had a very very thick accent and said he was calling me from AT&T and they are conducting a survey for customer satisfaction and so on, he also mentioned that there is a bill credit of $x per line for taking the survey. Considering I have been with AT&T for more than a decade and have been happy with their service, I was more than happy to answer a couple of questions. Towards the end of the “survey”, he mentioned I would be receiving a message with a number and I should repeat the same back to him to process my credit. I did receive the number and faithfully repeated the same to him. He said thanks and good bye and I did the same.

Once I came to office, I saw a series of emails that my account has been locked and need to be reactivated before I can use my phone. The idiotic me thought this was a hoax and when tried to call my wife it went to “AT&T Fraud Department”,  I cut the line and re tried with the same result. At this point I didn’t have a choice but to talk to the AT&T fraud department who explained to me the following

• Some one was trying to hack into my account and buy a phone on my account
• There is a pin number that is established between me and AT&T which should never be given to anyone at anytime
• There are apps out there that can make a phone call to have come from any number of your choice
• AT&T never calls people for a survey
• I have to go to the AT&T store with 2 forms of ID (DL and credit card would do) to get my account re-activated. Which I faithfully did and got my account back.

In retrospect, there were lot of red flags that should have triggered my defense mechanisms. For starters, the call came to me, I didn’t make the call; the guy on the other side had an extremely thick accent (even for outsourcing, it was bad), the bill credit of $x/line is ridiculous considering I have had to fight tooth and nail to get even $4.99 back from them. 

Of course all of these are hindsight, which in most cases is better than 20/20.