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Companies give cell phone bandits a new hang-up
December 10, 1996
Web posted at: 10:35 a.m. ESTFrom Correspondent Don Knapp
(CNN) -- High-tech detectives have come up with a way to snatch fingerprints out of the air, and it's helping stop thieves who charge calls to the accounts of unknowing cell phone customers.
The scam is known as cloning. Thieves capture the signal of a legitimate call, then electronically duplicate the cell phone number.
How do thieves get the numbers? With very little trouble -- if they have the right gear.
"(Certain) scanning devices allow them to monitor the radio airwaves and capture a subscriber's electronic serial number and their phone number as its being transmitted to the cellular network," says Erin Eggleton of Cellular One. "Once they have that, they use a black box with programming software (built) into it, where they can re-program those numbers into a second phone."
Then they steal phone time, and lots of it -- an estimated $1 million to $2 million worth a day in the United States and Canada.
But investigators have a new tool: the cell phone's unique, electronic signal "fingerprint."
"The natural way the phone is, every phone, even though they're made off the same assembly line, is different," said David Daniels of AirTouch Communications. "(They're) like snowflakes."
Daniels figured out how to use a phone's unique signal like a fingerprint. Special equipment on a cell tower reads the signal from cell phones. A computer then compares the phone's signal fingerprint with those belonging to phones of legitimate customers. If it differs from the one in the computer, the computer then cuts off the call.
By blocking calls from cloned phones, electronic fingerprinting will save cell phone companies many millions of dollars and help take a valuable tool out of the hands of criminals.
U.S. Attorney Michael Yamaguchi says the difficulty in tracing the origins of a call make cell phones useful for lawbreakers.
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Thanks to the new technology, cell phone companies say they've watched phone call fraud drop 75 percent in Chicago and 85 to 90 percent in Los Angeles. However, federal investigators say hard-core criminals such as drug dealers are still figuring out ways to use cloned phones to conduct their illegal trade. But now, the numbers are only used for several days instead of several weeks.
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