A source of information about pirated cellular phone numbers comes from the thieves themselves, phone company sleuths told members of the Illinois Commerce Commission on Wednesday.
It seems like the thieves-who steal portable phone ID numbers and program them into other phones so callers can run up thousands of dollars in bills and never pay a cent-are just like people running legitimate businesses:
They like to manipulate supply and demand to their own advantage.
So, if phone companies themselves don’t figure out after a month or so that a legitimate number has been swiped, the thieves call anonymously to get counterfeited numbers turned off. That way the thieves’ `customers’ will have to come back to buy a new bogus number to keep making free calls.
“These guys who charge $250 every time they reprogram a phone with a stolen number want their customers to keep coming back,” said Gilbert Wolf, manager of fraud prevention at Ameritech Cellular. “They’re very sophisticated.”
Cellular phone identification numbers are a combination of the phone number of a cell phone and its serial number. This combination is sent electronically to the cellular phone system each time a person makes or receives a call and can be plucked from the airwaves using special equipment.
Other devices can access a cell phone that is turned on but not in use to get that phone’s ID number. These pirating devices, advertised in electronics magazines, are relatively simple to use, phone officials said at Wednesday’s informational hearing.
Until recently, when a phone number was stolen and cloned into another phone, the cellular company generally learned of the theft when its customer got an outrageous bill, often with lengthy overseas calls. But that could be a month after the theft occurred.
Ameritech and Cellular One, the two cellular companies serving the Chicago area, now have computer surveillance in place that monitors a customer’s normal calling pattern, said Richard Lebredo, director of asset protection for Southwestern Bell Mobile, parent of Cellular One.
“If the computer notices a two-hour call to Los Angeles on a number that seldom had any long-distance traffic before, it’ll put up a red flag,” Lebredo said. “A few red flags, and we’ll contact the customer to find out if the calls are legitimate.”
The computer surveillance-like routine monitoring of charge-card usage by credit companies-means that swiped numbers can be detected within a day or so.
But the thieves have found a way around this, too, by traveling to other locales to steal their numbers. A New York pirate might fly into Chicago, swipe 1,000 numbers from the airwaves here, copy them to a computer disc and then return to New York to peddle them, said Lebredo.
Because cellular companies in New York don’t have consumer-use profiles on Chicago customers who visit there and use their “roaming” service, the shelf life of the illicit number is extended.
“In New York you’ll find people hanging out around pay phones and soliciting business on the street,” said Lebredo. “If you start to use a pay phone, they’ll offer you use of their cell phone for a flat fee.”
The next phase in the technology war between the pirates and the phone companies will center on 26-digit numbers to be built into cellular phones. Cellular carriers also will have that 26-digit ID in their switches.
Complex mathematical formulas will be used to keep changing passwords.
