I'm sure one can come up with more social engineering tactics, but if we talk about countries where people have and use proper documents, the American style sim swap is unheard of.
Those documents are not that hard to forge though.
It's simply more likely that the US has more high value targets, has more criminals/grifters doing this kind of fraud/scam, and non-US media talks less about these identity theft events.
I'm sure U.S has more valuable targets, but it's not the document itself that has to be fake in quite a few countries out there, you would also need forged chips etc. that go with it. Rogue employee is way easier than going this route. Self identification in the USA is way behind the world, the archaic voting system is a good example of it.
Why would you need to forge chips? (At least in Hungary even though the phone shop takes your plastic card and puts it into a photocopier, but they don't validate the chip in it. As far as I know.)
I agree that the US' lack of federally issued modern and safe credentials that then tie into the private sector is laughably painful. (But it's not like the rest of the world is that much better.)
The actual US voting systems are pretty okay (mail ballots, extremely low voter fraud, results are counted in a few days), the way that turns into representation is the problem. The usual news about voter ID laws are pure fascist voter suppression.
If it's pure fascist voter supression then whole Europe takes part of it as well? Besides the UK I guess who are similar to Americans when it comes to voting.
Every single argument against their current system and arguments against ID is what we all do here? Think you're too deep into their political rhetoric here and peddle misinformation.
I have no problem with requiring ID, even if it helps basically nothing with election security, but sure, let's do it. But let's do it in a way that doesn't disenfranchise vulnerable/disadvantaged groups. So appropriate funds, have some transitory period, etc.
Enforcing ID checks is essentially voter suppression if some groups of voters have them and some groups don't. In countries with universal (or even mandatory) IDs, doing the same isn't really voter suppression.
It's not the same. Voter ID laws in the US specifically (but not explicitly) target black and low-income demographics, who are far more likely to not have such ID documents. If having such documents was a long-standing requirement to function in society like it is in much of Europe (as far as I've heard), then it wouldn't be as big a deal.
All the arguments I've read from cost to where the get them apply to Europe as well?
I'm sure homeless people here as well tend to not have renewed documents if you talk about class.
I'm sure it's still a problem everywhere on some level, but not as big of a problem as it is in the US where large swaths of the population don't have sufficient ID documents.
Is it possible outside of the US? In Europe I need an ID card to get or replace a SIM card. Though that’s maybe different now that all stores are closed due to the pandemic.
Anyone who works at your operator can pull this off, or anyone that can bribe one of the former.
Then there are other ways to achieve the same thing without SIM swaps. SS7 level rerouting can be done globally ("this phone is now roaming from within our network").
It's actually extremely easy to hack in a targeted manner...
You can either do it with social engineering at range or even intercept the sms if you're physically close enough to the recipient