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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.
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.