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Cell Phone CEOs Marked For Phone Cloning
Saint Aardvark writes "When Sarah Drummond got back from Israel, she found a cell phone bill
for more
than $12,000. She contacted her
cell phone provider to let them know that someone had stolen her
phone, but they weren't interested in helping her and told her she'd
have to pay. In preparing for small claims court, she and her partner
found out that not only does her company have the ability to spot
unusual activity on a cell phone account, the company executives' own phones have
been targeted by a group linked to Hezbollah. From the article: 'They were
using actually a pretty brilliant psychology. Nobody wants to cut off
[CEO] Ted Rogers' phone or any people that are directly under Ted
Rogers, so they took their scanners to our building, like our north
building, where our senior top, top, top executives are. They took
their scanners there and also to Yorkville, where there are a lot of
high rollers and like it would be a major PR blunder to shoot first
and ask questions later. . . . Nobody wants to shut off Ted. Even if
he is calling Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.'"
I'm a Rogers Wireless Customer (no, I won't tell you my phone number :P) and it's a scary thought to see that if somebody stole my phone and ran up a $12 000 bill, they would expect me to pay it.
But what really makes me wonder is why they didn't stop to ask somebody! Sure, you don't want to cut off Ted Rogers' phone, but if you told him about it and said "this is unusual activity in your account - are you sure it's not fraud?" it would probably have been a good idea. Credit card companies (that I can recall) do just that.
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So, in essence, this Rogers company is aiding and abetting terrorist groups by forcing their customers to sponsor cell phone usage by those groups.
Sounds like just the sort of thing the USA PATRIOT Act was meant to stop, but somehow I doubt that the FBI is going to step in.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step -- and so it was that law professor Susan Drummond's long, strange trip into the world of wireless security, where she learned that a terrorist organization had appropriated Ted Rogers' cellphone number, was launched by the arrival of a phone bill for $12,237.60.
Okay, thanks for introducing Ms. Drummond. Who the hell is Ted Rogers and what did that have to do with Ms. Drummonds number being cloned. I don't think they did a very good job of explaining that. I read the article twice and still have no idea who Ted Rogers is.
"They were cloning the senior executives repeatedly, because everyone was afraid to cut off Ted Rogers' phone,"
Uh.. okay, well.. why didn't they do it to Ms. Drummond's phone either? Crappy article.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Moral of the story: As soon as you know your SIM is stolen, CONTACT YOUR CELLPHONE COMPANY ... As it is, all that's happened is silly girl didn't report a stolen phone.
I know reading the article is frowned upon here and all, but it does kind of point out that the woman had been out of the country for a month and returned to find a huge phone bill. In the course of investigating what happened, she was told that her company did have pattern matching/potential abuse detection software deployed but ignores the results. The "silly girl" is an edge case due to the length of her being out of the country, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for the phone company. They chose to ignore what was 99.999% an abusive situation either to profit or out of complete cluelessness. Neither case gets a whole lot of sympathy from me. Here's a basic algorithm:
If an account's monthly balance >= 3*Average of 3 previous month's total charges, chances are something is wrong. Of course, you have to add checks for a new account, but that's not that much more difficult.
Such things aren't too surprising from unheard-of little fucktowns in Florida, the fraud and extortion capital of the United States. But banks and other businesses are starting to realize they can get away with the same thing, and there's little people can do except pay. I've had a credit union reorder my transactions to turn a single overdraft into several smaller ones and charge me an extra $100 in fees (which I never paid), and I've had a phone company try to collect on phone service which they restarted after I canceled it and moved away.
They have the cops and the courts in their pockets, and they think they're safe in their ivory towers. But I'm here to tell you, they've got another thing coming.
i actually typoed that as "lies" originally... ironically it might just fit... anyways:
Jan Innes, a vice-president with Rogers Communications, confirmed that the company has an automatic fraud-detection system that flags suspicious calling patterns, but refused to say how it works. "We do not give out information that might help people get around the system," she said.
Translation: "Our system is not fool-proof, and we are aware it can be exploited, but are doing nothing to prevent it. We are instead crossing our fingers with the obscure hope that out of our thousands or millions of users, not one will stumble across an exploit. Security through obscurity!"
Thanks Rogers, I'll be sure to avoid you guys like the plague if I ever get a cell phone.
In all honesty...How the hell could Rogers miss out on $12,000 worth of phone calls. I'm fairly certain that in their entire customer database only a few customers could actually produce this kind of traffic. If Rogers thinks a judge will let them bilk one woman for making $12,000 worth of phone calls I think common sense will kick in.