TracFone Wireless Slapped With $16 Million Fine Over Breaches

Wireless service provider TracFone Wireless Inc. will pay a $16 million civil penalty to settle the Federal Communications Commission’s investigation into its security practices.

The FCC’s Enforcement Bureau probed the prepaid mobile provider’s security measures after a trio of data breaches exposed some of TracFone’s customers’ proprietary information between 2021 and 2023, according to a consent decree adopted on July 19.

TracFone, a subsidiary of Verizon Communications Inc., violated the Communications Act of 1934 which mandates privacy requirements for customer proprietary network information, according to the Commission. The three breaches originally stemmed from exploitation of application programming interfaces (APIs), ...