Cellular Phone Scam Goes by the Numbers : Protective measures can ward off cloning’s perpetrators
So, you would love to enjoy the convenience and the security of having a cellular phone, but find the costs somewhat burdensome or prohibitive. Well, talk loudly and often enough about it and someone just might surface who will offer you a deal that seems too good to pass up. Take our advice, and pass.
It happened recently to a busy young woman who is working her way through college. She wasn’t suspicious when the two fellows who sold her the telephone kept forgetting to give her the unit’s telephone number and told her she shouldn’t give it to anyone anyway. (“Too many people will call you and it will get expensive,” they said.) She wasn’t suspicious about the low-cost payment arrangement, in which she just paid the guys and never received a bill in the mail. She wasn’t even suspicious when the telephone repeatedly failed to function after only a few days of use. She just took it back to the guys, who fiddled with it and made it work again . . . for a few days.
This otherwise intelligent woman was an unwitting participant in the $300-million-a-year cellular telephone fraud crime wave. This particular gambit is known as “repeat business.” The dupe is sold a cell phone that was either stolen or bought at a discount. The telephone has been programmed with an Electronic Serial Number (ESN) already owned by a legitimate cellular phone user. That, as Times reporters Chip Johnson and Adam S. Bauman point out, makes the illegal unit a “clone phone.”
She was never given a number for her unit because the legitimate owners of the number would be receiving her return calls. She never received a bill for her calls for the same reason. The phone service on her unit was repeatedly interrupted after a few days because the legitimate owners were getting the bill, reporting the fraud, and getting new telephone numbers. Those of you who have received huge cellular phone bills filled with calls you never made know what we mean.
When she took the unit back to the sellers, they kept putting someone else’s ESN on it--maybe yours.
In a crackdown on such operations, Glendale police detectives recently arrested the two owners of an electronics store on La Cienega Boulevard in what may be one of the biggest cellular phone fraud operations ever in Southern California. Police say they confiscated more than 100 clone phones and the computer equipment needed to create them.
It is estimated that a quarter of the cellular telephone calls made in the Los Angeles area are made from counterfeit phones. That’s something to think about when you consider that the countermeasures necessary to interdict such crime will only make the service more expensive, and more complicated to use. It’s also something to think about if you ever make a police emergency 911 call from your cell phone, and get a “system busy” signal because illegal calls are jamming up the air time.
What should you do to protect yourself, and help detect fraud? We have a few answers from the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Assn.:
* Lock your car phone, or remove the handset and the antenna when you leave your car unattended.
* Keep your subscriber agreement, which includes your electronic serial number, in a private place.
* Carefully check your monthly bill for unfamiliar numbers and report them to your cellular phone company.
* If you frequently receive hang-up calls or wrong number calls, report it. It may mean that your number has been tapped by a clone user.
* Have your cellular provider eliminate long-distance dialing capabilities if you only use it for local calls.
And if you acquired your cellular phone through one of those “don’t pay the phone company, just pay us” kind of deals, turn the phone in and the person who sold it to you. You have been unwittingly participating in a felony crime in California.
