Chicago-based wireless phone customers of Cellular One found they couldn’t use their phones in the Detroit area last week because of a breakdown in the service’s anti-fraud system.
Communication of anti-fraud information between Cellular One and AirTouch Communications Inc., the wireless service that handles Cellular One calls from customers who visit the Detroit area, stopped working properly sometime last weekend, said Mindy Graika, Cellular One’s manager of advertising and promotions.
It has shut down service for customers traveling in Detroit and areas of northern Ohio.
“We know this is an inconvenience,” she said, “but we think it’s less of a problem than subjecting our customers to huge bills run up by cloners who steal their phone numbers.”
Cellular One’s anti-cloning technology uses a secret code that communicates special numbers between the phone and the base station to authenticate calls in a system separate from the radio transmission for each call. Somehow this system has broken down in Detroit and the anti-fraud system detected that some numbers were being cloned, Graika said.
