T-Mobile tried (and failed) to recover your stolen data by paying off hackers

If you were a current, former, or even “prospective” T-Mobile customer at the time of the biggest data breach in the wireless service provider’s history last summer, you might be wondering what happened with your potentially compromised personal information over the past eight months or so.

Unfortunately, there’s no way to know exactly what data landed where and just how many bad actors had the chance to look at a treasure trove of names, addresses, birthdates, social security numbers, driver’s licenses, phone numbers, IMEI, and IMSI numbers for a possible havoc-wreaking angle.

The “Un-carrier” did try to negotiate with the online seller of said illegally obtained information via an unnamed third party, which went so far as to pay a total of $200,000 for “exclusive” access to the data rightfully belonging to at least 30 million individuals.

Although somewhat controversial… for pretty obvious reasons, Magenta’s alleged hiring of a third party to carry negotiations in its name for the retrieval of stolen data is apparently fairly standard practice in these types of cases.