I have had my telephone company ask me to give them a code sent to my device. It is presumably to prove to the company that the representative is talking to me so that bad actors low in the company cannot start randomly messing with people’s accounts. It is the equivalent of the bad click here. The only real defense is to know the difference between a mechanism meant to authorize someone a the company and a mechanism to authorize you. Confuse the latter for the former like the victim did here and bad things will happen.