Cellular Phone Users a Soft Touch for Thieves : Crime: With customers increasing 35% a year, heists and fraud are soaring in the county. The cloning of numbers leads to some astronomical bills.
Ventura County criminals are taking to heart the phone company’s advice to “reach out and touch someone,” but they’re not using their own telephones.
Instead, they are stealing other people’s cellular phones--usually from automobiles--at an alarming rate and running up fantastically large long-distance phone bills.
As cellular phones become more popular, they are becoming more popular to steal.
“We get more phones stolen than stereos,” Ventura Police Det. Lynne Klamser said. “Most people just leave them sitting in plain view inside their cars.”
The Greater Los Angeles area is the nation’s largest cellular market--with about 1.5 million customers--and the number of customers is growing 35% a year, according to Melissa May, a spokeswoman for AirTouch Cellular.
Last year, 90 cellular phones were reported stolen in Thousand Oaks, law enforcement records show. That number jumped to 150 during the first 10 months of this year. In Simi Valley, 108 cellular phones were reported stolen last year, and police estimate about 125 will be stolen this year.
Employees at Ventura’s Advantage Cellular Inc. fielded about one call a week from customers reporting stolen phones in 1994. “Now we get a call a day,” said co-owner Sig Askvik.
It’s not a particularly challenging heist, according to Sheriff’s Sgt. Mark Ritchie.
“A crook walks up to a car in a parking lot, breaks the window and in less than 10 seconds he is walking away with a phone,” he said.
What happens next depends on the criminal’s level of sophistication.
In Ventura, portable phones are often stolen by drug addicts who simply start making calls to buy and sell drugs until the phone is shut off by the phone company, Klamser said.
When that happens, the victim is hit with a large phone bill along with the expense of car window repairs and the lost phone. Fortunately, phone companies shoulder the cost of the unauthorized phone calls.
But for the more technically adroit thieves, snatching a cellular phone is just the beginning.
Next they steal another person’s phone number--a process called cloning--and program it into the stolen phone and possibly several others. The reprogrammed phones are often resold from the trunk of a car.
“Once they get a hold of a phone number, they go crazy,” Askvik said. “They start calling New York City, Mexico, Pakistan, anywhere.
“It’s gotten really bad in the past year. Customers report about $50,000 worth of fraudulent calls to us every month. Sometimes a customer will get a phone bill in his mailbox for $10,000.”
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But cellular phone customers don’t have to wait until they receive a heart-stopping monthly bill to realize there is a problem. Other tell-tale signs include reports of constant busy signals and strangers answering on your phone number.
“My husband’s line was always busy, even when his phone was resting in his pocket,” said Karen Jones, who owns a hubcap shop in Ventura with her husband, Jim. “Customers were wondering why they could never get through.”
The Joneses’ July phone bill was $1,700--$1,500 more than usual--and listed unauthorized calls to New York City and Chicago.
“Generally, we just use the phone to call around Ventura County, Santa Barbara and L.A.,” said Karen Jones, whose phone number was recently cloned for a second time.
Victims of phone fraud must either have their phone number changed--a major inconvenience, especially for business people--or purchase a new phone.
Phone hackers clone phones using an electronic scanner that reads a phone’s serial number and phone number.
“Someone can stand on an overpass and pick up your phone’s information as you drive by,” Askvik said. A customer doesn’t even have to be talking on the phone--it only has to be on standby, ready to receive calls--for the scanner to work.
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Once the information is gleaned, hackers use computer software to reprogram other phones with the stolen number to create bootleg phone service that is sold to the highest bidders.
Phone fraud is expected to cost the nation’s cellular telephone companies more than $500 million--up about 45% from 1993, according to Mike Houghton, a spokesman for the Cellular Telephone Industries Assn.
“It’s a serious problem and a real inconvenience to customers,” said AirTouch’s May, who estimated that cellular providers in the Los Angeles area will lose tens of millions in revenues this year.
But cellular phone companies are fighting back with new technology and full-time fraud investigation units.
Through September, more than 1,300 people in the Greater Los Angeles area had been arrested this year for fraudulent use of AirTouch’s phone service, May said. Prison sentences for such a felony generally range from 16 months to five years, with a conviction rate of about 90%, she added.
The first line of defense against hackers is the simplest--keeping stolen units out of their hands. Customers are urged not to leave cellular phones inside their cars, especially during the holiday shopping season, or to at least lock them in the trunk.
Phone companies are also fighting fraud by monitoring customer calling patterns for irregularities.
A slew of long-distance and international calls made in a short amount of time will send up a red flag to phone company officials. The customer is then contacted to determine whether the calls were authorized.
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Sometimes, detecting phone fraud is painfully obvious, like when the same phone is used to make a call from Sacramento, and minutes later from Orange County, May said.
Another weapon in the arsenal is tracking “phone prints.” Every cellular phone has its own unique frequency pattern. A cloned phone will use another phone’s serial number and phone number, but the frequency pattern cannot be imitated.
Fraud or no fraud, the Joneses of Ventura said they aren’t giving up their cellular phones.
“They’ve become a way of life,” Karen Jones said. “We’ve been using cell phones in our business for six years.”
