Slashdot Mirror
Tracking Down a Cell Phone Thief
Zone-MR writes "Last Saturday, MoDaCo (the world's largest smartphone community) held a get-together for their forum members. Unfortunately the positive community spirit was soured by an individual who decided to steal one of the charity raffle prizes - a C550 mobile phone. Check out the story of how we tracked the thief down, got the phone back, and secured the thief's place in the interweb's hall-of-shame."
Was Slashdot just slashdotted?
Who the hell says interweb?
sp!
I hope slashdot doesn't track me down.
That has to be the dumbest thing ever. Stealing something guarenteed to broadcast its presence. And from within a tech convention?
Go Away! Not for Sale
That is kick-ass. Congrats on getting the phone back. More power to the interweb !!!
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
http://zone-mr.net/?act=entry&id=36
/services/simlock_2.php - 82.163.137.156
Last Saturday, MoDaCo (the world's largest smartphone community) held a get-together for their forum members. Unfortunately the positive community spirit was soured by an individual who decided to steal one of the charity raffle prizes - a C550 mobile phone.
On Monday, Paul O'Brien (MoDaCo founder) contacted me with information on the stolen phone's IMEI number. I operate the SPV-Developers community which offers the free online SPV-Services unlock tool for this type of phone. It seemed likely that the thief would attempt to remove the SIMLock using this service in order to switch the phone to a non-UK network - bypassing the UK's IMEI blacklist which renders stolen phones useless.
Initially it seemed like there was little I could do to help. The SPV-Services server was not programmed to log the IMEI numbers of it's users. It seemed like a dead end, until I remembered something. When a user unlocks their phone, our server keeps a backup of the phone's first flash block (kept for a few days, in case the changes need to be reversed). This block contains 64kB of RSA-encrypted data such as the phone's SIMLock state, Carrier ID, and other concealed information - it seemed likely the IMEI would be buried within it. Shortly my suspicion was confirmed - after decrypting the block, the IMEI can be found inside (albeit scrambled with a simple transposition).
I started writing a short script - which would check each backup in turn to see if it originated from the stolen phone. After 30 minutes of writing, testing, and running the script - we had a match! The stolen phone had been unlocked. The creation timestamp on the backup file gave us an exact time - August 21, 2005, 10:18:32 PM.
The next step was cross-referencing this information with our web server logs. When a user uses our software to unlock their phone the software uploads the encrypted block to our server, which sends back a list of modifications which need to be made in order to remove the SIMLock. As we knew the exact time when this happened, we could find the corresponding web server entry :
2005-08-21 22:18:32 POST
Bingo! I passed this IP address back to Paul who cross-referenced it with Modaco's database. From this, he was able to identify the guilty member. A quick lookup confirmed that the IP was used by the account "Cocky" - a member which had attended the get-together. The event registrations contained the name of our theif, and his mobile number. The next day, Cocky (AKA Krassen P.) received a short phone call:
Paul: Hi, this is Paul from MoDaCo.
Cocky: Er, Hi.
Paul: You have something of mine, and I want it back.
Not surprisingly, Paul could hear the faint sound of the guy crapping himself at the other end of the line. The phone was returned, via special delivery, the following day. Moral of the story - even if you're enough of a cunt to steal from a charity raffle, don't be fucktarded enough to steal a phone from a community of phone experts.
...and a little luck.
While some good detective work was done by the MoDaCo admin(s?), a lot of thanks can be given to chance, because the cultprit was stupid enough to unlock his phone a) from a source well known to MoDaCo and b) from the same IP address. I'm calling it 25% good sleuthing, 75% dumb criminal.
Error 503 Error 500
Track the guy who is stealing your bandwith. Or else track the guy who buys your bandwith.
In soviet russia, telephone finds YOU!
its great to read a story where the bad guy gets what he deserves. There was a little luck involved with this. If the thief would have used a wifi hotspot, or a proxy, or any other box other than his home, he could of hide his tracks when he unlocked the phone.
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
was it just my ISP or did slashdot just go down?
shanegrant.com
Fucktarded. That had to be the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Never heard that one.
Great job guys. You got the phone back, but did he go to jail/get arrested/fined anything? Or just 0wn3d online?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
oh the reasons you couldn't steal.. It is worth a laugh.
= 2037&
http://www.longislandpress.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p
omgs slashdot was haxored.
I am the first to claim i did it
I shallbe know as n00bmaster.
ah wait, is that the cops,
BANG BANG BANG
Hm, maybe the thief should have picked the COPS! This web exposure is a lot, lot worse than what some donut-feasting cops would bother to do.
503 - Service unavailable. Come back some other time.
"...even if you're enough of a cunt to steal from a charity raffle,..."
uhm... and why is it geeks don't get laid?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Haha!
To paraphrase "The comic book guy"
Worst. Thief. Ever!
Seriously though, after going through all that effort to track the guy down, they should have sent his contact info to the local police departement.
The last time I saw "interweb" was on one of those 4Chan-esque sites. Odd. This is related to the story, however, because the theif is as smart as a 4Channer.
to somewhere by an old dry lake bed, where they are guarded by a warden with a chip on her shoulder, who is in search of old, stolen booty, and makes you dig a 5' hole every day.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
its clear that it can't run OSX86.
Isn't it heartwarming that MoDaCo employees were willing to spend DAYs of time and $1000s in lost productivity to track down a $200 phone and a kleptomaniac.
...if it weren't for those lousy kids.
Fucking hillarious.
Good thing this was in the UK... seems like decrypting the info to retrieve the IMEI information would violate the DMCA here in the states.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Here is the turd making a comment on the thread regarding the event and the missing phone.
t 225214-s15.html
http://www.modaco.com/Event_pictures_and_a_plea_-
What an idiot.
That story is a perfect example of stuff that matters. These Slashdot editors have it pinned down.
Of course everyone wants to know how some guy in England tracked down a thief!
Howard forums are MUCH larger than modaco, re: smartphones. See for yourself.
http://smartphone.modaco.com/index.php
has:
414 user(s) active in the past 30 minutes
379 guests, 35 members 0 anonymous members
while
http://howardforums.com/
has:
Currently Active Users: 3410 (1128 members and 2282 guests)
This 7+ minute wait between replys is excessive. I'll contact my councilwoman... when she gets back from her vacation.
I went to the campus police and filed a report. They said they'll get their detective to work on it later that day. I fought it was just a waste of time at first but then I slowly realized how stupid it is to steal a cell phone. Any call from that phone can be traced by the phone company. And sure enough that evening the police called me and told me to come pick up my cell phone. They called this idiot and told him that he better return it, to make it easier on him. He claimed that he didn't steal it but bought it from someone for $30. Yeah right! Anyway he returned it and I got my phone back.
Later the police gave me a copy of the sheet he singed when he returned the stolen item and the sheet has this guy's home address, date of birth and social security. I checked his court records and he has like 10 convictions on his record for theft, drug charges and some smaller things. I thought of posting his info out on the web, for people to have some fun with, but that would be a little too evil for me.
"...don't be fucktarded enough to steal a phone from a community of phone experts..."
HERE'S YOUR SIGN
The article seems well...interesting...to people who care....
I guess I don't find it interesting...
It's just that....I was expecting to hear a cool detective story about how everyone whips out massive Windows (r) Smartphones...and then the thief gets away by the skin of his BSOD
$sig$
Aww man. Someone needs to mod this up. Its the only thing that made me laugh all night.
zosxavius photography
So this thief forced the issue over at the SMI-unlocker's backup repository: they keep a copy of your personal info handy. All it takes is a call from a usergroup president, or some other event that convinces the unlocker's CEO (or tech, or intern...) that it's OK to riffle through that personal info, and they're off. Then they do a little decryption of the personal info, and they can see whatever they want.
I applaud their catching the thief - the thief is a scumbag, and a fool to steal from a group of passionate experts. In person, I'm enthusiastic about chasing down a thief, and beating the crap out of them until the cops come. But even though that's an overreaction (that I stand by), it still damages only the thief (as long as we got the right guy...). This invasion of privacy violated hundreds or thousands of people who did nothing to earn it. They possibly didn't even realize that their personal info was being "backed up" at the server.
Some might say that they'd never know their privacy was invaded, and no damage was done. But I'm not talking about the damage or further loss. Their actual privacy was invaded. It's not OK to put your hand in my pocket and feel around, even if you don't take my wallet, even if I don't notice. This event has done us at least two services: one, caught a sleazy thief. Another, revealed that the trust people place in the unlocker is misplaced indeed.
--
make install -not war
Thats its DoCaMo, not whatever the editor put?
Ya'll, ah ain't nevah hurdah no such thang as tha'ch'all talkin' bout... thet thar internet.
Shouldn't you be in the hall-of-shame for using a dorky word like "interweb"?
This is no different from people tracking you down for dissenting against the Government, and yet you Slashdotters applaud this? You aren't pro-Freedom at all.
FTA: after decrypting the block, the IMEI can be found inside
Couldn't they just give that to the cell provider and have it tracked that way?
Yea well i've read it a couple times and seen the movie twice, and I still didn't find it funny. Beat that!
Have you metaroderated recently?
Right now this is just above your post.
How I wish they could stay together forever!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
mod this child down too...;P
I'm serious whats up with british people and their need to make and have dossiers? :)
I mean look blair did it, the idiot who lost his phone did it...
dossier this dossier that, if you call me names i'm going to make a dossier on you and present it somewhere of little importance
get over it already!
Arash
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
http://www.modaco.com/index.php?act=Reg&CODE=00
"You agree, through your use of this service, that you will not use MoDaCo to post any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy , or otherwise violative of any law. "
http://eriksonlinestore.com/swarm/ - go there for a free gift certificate on http://eriksonlinestore.com/ A 300 value....
If this had happened at the US Department of Homeland Security, they would have raised the alert level to Orange and we would be told to be on the lookout for slightly overweight middle-aged men with glasses, wearing dockers, using a cellphone.
Anyone seen using a cellphone in a dark corner or putting a cellphone in an inside pocket (trying to conceal it!) will be immediately taken in for questioning.
Henceforth, all cellphone usage will require a licence at the county courthouse, and people must submit valid reasons for having one, and give their fingerprints and DNA for registration.
"Yer criminals are mostly stupid."
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Isn't there an 'unwritten' rule amongst thieves on cell phones in countries with oligopoly-based cell phone services, saying that stealing cell phones is a big no-no, because they can be tracked? In poorer countries where GSM is not widespread and blacklists are not kept, such crimes are still possible.
-Palal
Really, really, really cool people.
crotchtacular.
Modaco focuses on Smartphone (tm) (Windows Mobile based) whereas HowardForums is smartphone (generic).
Stupid cell runs Windows! Why would anyone want to steal THAT?
If you want real performace, get the "E" class (Mercedes ref.)-- Motorola E680i. It runs Linux and has an sd slot, FM tuner,J2ME apps, etc.
Has anyone noticed that the way they caught this person shows that they are collecting PII that their site policy says does not happen??
Getting IMEI's from users that have been told it would NOT be collected. Isn't that bad? Maybe a little worst then a phone missing. I sould never use thier service - I could be tracked and my info given to the man.
Typical Slashdot hypocracy.
While the article is interesting, I believe it would be even more interesting to hear how they decrypted the RSA encrypted data. Also, why would RSA be used at all? Is the private key help by the cell phone maker? This would mean the public key must be programmed into the phone, which makes the encryption a pointless effort since its easily decrypted using the available key, hence the crypto serves no purpose?
I am sure the explaination of the RSA decryption would be an interesting story by itself.
>This block contains 64kB of RSA-encrypted data such
>as the phone's SIMLock state, Carrier ID, and other
>concealed information - it seemed likely the IMEI
>would be buried within it. Shortly my suspicion was
>confirmed - after decrypting the block,
I'll bite this troll.
We have repeatedly stated that we keep a TEMPORARY backup of the flash block we change - generally as a precaution in case we screw something up and need to restore the phone.
And, per the Data Protection Act (unless you can justify that the backup block you store cannot be used to identify a living human, which you have just counterexampled), does your site make it clear that you may also use the temporary copy of the flash block to track down living humans for vigilante purposes?
Doesn't matter how obvious it is to you or any other civilian that someone has broken the law, without the intervention of the Police, the DPA says you simply can't implement new convenient uses for personal data unless your users accepted it when they supplied it.
If you are under EU jurisdiction, you broke the law, sorry. Whether any affected party cares or not will determine whether action is taken against you (ie almost certainly none).
"He's making a list, ..."
.conf or .ini file, except in the real world. Use it. If nothing else, it's much more succinct than the usual "a list of names and stuff and other shit".
Checking it twice
Seriously. You've just learnt a useful new word today. It means something like an array, or maybe a
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
Bieng in the UK, the site would have to abide by the Data Protection Act 1998, which basically specifies what a company can and can't do with personal infomation.
Notably, the DPA applies only to personally identifiable infomation - given that it's not possible to identify someone from an I.P. number alone, nor an IMEI number, no laws were broken and what these guys did was perfectly legal.
That said, I can't find a notice on their site regarding the DPA, the data they collect, and what it's used for, so MaDoCo may be in breach of the DPA. That said, even big commercial sites like Amazon fail to include the required notices, so they're unlikely to suffer action over it.
Oh, and I'm the fourth here that's read it :D
My UID is prime... is yours?
Hypocrisy is what I call it. If the govt had done this and not you,your knickers would be ALL in a twist over this. There would be protests outside 10 downing st., fat middle-aged bearded men would chain themselves together outside of police stations. It would be CHAOS! BUT! If some admin out there wants to violate everyones privacy and break the DPA...then..well THATS OK because we allll know a crime was being committed. And the ends justify the means! I call BS. You report a crime to the police and they handle it. YOU ARE NOT ABOVE THE LAW!
I've carefully considered the usage of the word "cunt" as an insult, along with the other insult "pussy." Both have negative connotations for something that should not have them. There is no good reason why the word "cunt" should be an insult.
Therefore, I've concluded that we should start from scratch with a new word for female genitalia that has not been spoilt. Furthermore, in order to prevent this word being appropriated, I believe it should be something that could not be used as an insult.
I have settled on the word WOOHA! This to me, conveys a sense of fun and is equally nothing that could be yelled in anger (try it - you see?). However, it works in a flitatious-dirty talk-sexy way.
E.g.: "I touched her woo-ha," "I want to [adjective][verb] your wooha," "Ooh, yes - kiss my woo-ha!" Etc.
I call on
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
That's a daft idea - you silly wooha.
The data block that was shared was not in itself personally ident infomation - that infomation was already held by the forum. The datablock itself was used to I.D. a particular phone, and according to the DPA's interpretive provisions, that infomation is not classified as personally identifiable. It would have become so had the forums administrator passed that infomation on to the Grandparent, but the flow of infomation went the other way (I.e, npi was given to someone who already possessed the pi), and was therefore not illegal.
This is, incidentally, the same workaround that allows someone to trace an I.P. address and report the owner of said I.P. address to their ISP - the I.P. address and access log timestamp on thier own are not personally identifiable, and only become so when given to the ISP - who alraedy has that infomation anyway.
... in europe. Here you can remove the card. But you can't put in a card from another company. But wait: when you can't remove the card then it should be no problem to track the plone down because the fixed id (that is used to show the phone company who gets billed) can't be removed, right?
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
That's a daft idea - you silly wooha.
Point proved! I am amused not offended! Henceforth, let us all use wooha (um, as in use the word, though use otherwise is fine too.)
It's fun redesigning the English language.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
It's fun redesigning the English language.
Well, the folks on Slashdot have certainly been trying that for years.
Its a funny thing in the english language that most expletives are based on sex, excrement or religion.
(i believe) that in Maori and other polenesian cultures there arnt really any swear words, and the biggest insults are along the lines of eating your enemies. (i.e. you would tell someone to "go boil their head" and/or "prepare yourself for me to eat you")
So when does the theif get tarred and feathered? No? Ok, get him fired from his current job or at least arrested.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I realize nobody's likely to read this (heck this story's *days* old - the world moves on) but I have an inverse question - why on earth aren't you checking the stolen 'phones list?
I certainly agree that once I've bought a 'phone it's mine to do what I want, but for at least one user of this service there's a good chance the 'phone's not theirs - It's bloody mine!