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Has My Cell Number Been Cloned?
2bepissedoff asks: "According to my T-mobile phone bill, I have been receiving incoming calls from a 'NBR unavailable', since February, with talk time ranging from 1 minute to an hour. The strangest thing is, I have never received these calls (my phone doesn't ring and I haven't talked to the caller). I only started noticing them when my phone bill was charged over $40 more than my regular bill. Of course, I have a family plan (2 people only, 2 lines) and I talked to my partner. The answer: he too had not received any of these calls, especially over 300 minutes per month of them. We called up T-mobile twice and claim the possibility of phone cloning. Both representatives hung up on me, thinking I was trying to con them or something. Any advice to what this could be?"
I did a little investigation and I've noticed that some of the NBR minutes overlap with calls I actually make. For example:
'2/22 at 3:28 pm "NBR unavailable" 17mins usage.
2/22 at 3:44 pm "-(# I made)---" 3mins usage.
So if you add up the time 3:28pm + 17 mins = 3:45 pm. The time when I made my call was at 3:44 pm. This reoccurs several times. I still do not think this is enough evidence to convince T-mobile of Phone Cloning. So I am thinking of switching either my number or my service provider. "
'2/22 at 3:28 pm "NBR unavailable" 17mins usage.
2/22 at 3:44 pm "-(# I made)---" 3mins usage.
So if you add up the time 3:28pm + 17 mins = 3:45 pm. The time when I made my call was at 3:44 pm. This reoccurs several times. I still do not think this is enough evidence to convince T-mobile of Phone Cloning. So I am thinking of switching either my number or my service provider. "
Have you seen all the spy movies. They are listening to your calls ;)
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
You're a human being. But more importantly, you're a paying customer. Call them up, get the guy's name. Inform him that if he hangs up, you'll contact his supervisor. Then ask him what zip code these calls were made from, they should be able to figure that out. Verify that it's something reasonable.
If they won't believe you and you can convince them you're not making the calls, try calling the number and letting your phone ring. See if anyone picks up.
If that doesn't work, simply demand they change your number for you.
If they refuse to do that, be sure to inform them where you're taking your business.
Personally, I'd be pretty damned pissed if anyone ever hung up on me when I was simply inquiring as to why they were charging me money. In fact, I know right where I'd file that complaint.
If I had a credit card associated with the account, I'd call my credit card company and dispute the charge. You explain to the credit card company that they hung up on you twice. What the operator will do is put you on hold while they contact T-Mobile. The operator should introduce you to the T-Mobile rep and try to resolve the issue. If T-Mobile has a call from a credit card company, I'm certain they'll be a bit more understanding when they're looking at the possibility of having to chase down a stopped payment.
My work here is dung.
I showed up at a Verizon Wireless sales center, yelling and complaining (trust me, I can throw quite the tantrum,) until a manager finally got in touch with someone to fix the issue.
I got three months of free service for the trouble.. and since I've had perfect phone bills.
Never underestimate the power of being an ass when you're not treated fairly..
"Snatching defeat from the mouth of victory on a daily basis."
Or your partner is cheating on you, did receive those calls, and is lying to you about it.
(Just saying. It happens all the time.)
Don't look for zebras when all you have are horses, or, always look for the simplest answer.
It sounds like your boyfriend is cheating on you and is telling his new boyfriend to use number blocking (*67). Then when you ask him about it, he denies everything.
Oh dear God!
My phone bill would be hundreds of pounds a month - rather than the £15-£20 it normally is - if this happened in the UK. Over here, we get charged for making calls from our mobiles (cell phones), but the person calling my mobile is the one who gets charged for ringing me - I don't get charged for that unless I'm in a different country.
How come American consumers haven't risen up and complained about this? It seems a bit of a rip off to me.
--
silas
I had a similar problem with AT&T Wireless a long time ago (ca. 1998), when they first introduced their "one-rate" service (no extra charges for long distance or roaming, a major innovation back then). For about three months, every single call I made or received appeared twice on my bill: once listed under the actual time I made or received it, and once listed precisely three hours later. That is, for every 17-minute call at 8:53, say, there'd be a corresponding 17-minute call at 11:53. I immediately recognized that this had to have something to do with the fact that I was using a phone with a New York number in California (three-hour time difference). The net result was close to a thousand dollars in overage charges -- while I was careful to keep all my usage under the 1500 minutes per month included in my plan, I was getting charged for more like 3000 minutes at a ridiculous overage rate of 25 cents a minute.
The first month the problem showed up I thought it would be a quick fix -- obviously no rational human being could think that I was studiously duplicating every single one of my hundreds of calls exactly three hours apart.
Silly me.
I went through eight months of hell trying to get an AT&T representative to acknowledge there was a problem. I must have made at least 100 calls, sent numerous faxes and letters, and spoken to at least 20 different "supervisors" -- they kept "disappearing," forcing me to start telling the story all over again each time I called.
To a man/woman, they all kept insisting that if the calls appeared on my bill, I had to have made them (since we all know computerized billing systems never have bugs). Until the very end I never got a single one of them to admit that there just MIGHT be a problem if every single one of my hundreds of calls appeared precisely twice, 3 hours apart, on each bill. No, I simply had to have made those calls, there was no other explanation.
Naturally were flatly unwilling to refund the overage charges which, as I mentioned, reached almost $1000 by the third bill. (I didn't cancel the service because I was dependent on it - it was my only phone line, there was no number portability back then, no other service offered "free" roaming/LD which I needed as a New Yorker stuck in California). They did agree to let me pay only the non-disputed charge until the dispute process was over, but soon started sending me dunning letters anyway.
The problem stopped happening after the third month, but I spent most of the rest of the year trying to get them to reverse the excess charges. It was hell, no other word for it. It wasn't the prospect of having to pay a thousand dollars that scared and angered me, it was the simple fact that a large and respected (!) company like AT&T obviously had a policy for its customer support people that went "no matter how obvious it is that the customer is right, you must insist that he is wrong." I don't see how any rational person could fail to recognize that what happened was a massive computer billing error, but as I mentioned before, I never got *anyone* to admit it. By the end, my conversations with them were so psychologically draining that I was starting to wonder if it really could be my mistake somehow.
The very end of the saga -- eight months later - was that I finally managed to talk to a manager who agreed there was a problem, told me that many others had experienced it, and canceled all the excess charges, just like that. So, basically, they'd known all along that there was a problem. and just kept stonewalling in the hopes that I'd break down and pay them.
That experience marked the end of my innocence about big, respectable business. In a very real sense, I "grew up" over those 8 months.
If its a GSM phone, I very much doubt any cloning has occured for the following reasons.
BTW, I used to work for Logica, in the telecoms division, and have a LOT of knowledge of GSM systems, and how they work. I am also a T-Mobile (UK) customer.
Remember these facts:
- A GSM phone has a unique IMEI number.
- Each GSM phone has a unique SIM card with a unique SIM number. This SIM number is attacted on a central computer to your account.
- Although the SIM card does contain your number, it is many for informative, and not operational purposes.
When you switch on your phone and it logs onto your network, it sends its IMEI number, and its SIM number to the network. The network then looks up the SIM number and associates it with a number. As it stands, only one SIM number can ever be associated with a phone number. When i tried getting a new SIM to replace my aging SIM, the old one was disconnected before the new SIM was issued, as it is simply not possible to associate a number with two SIMs. You can associate a SIM with two or more numbers, but not the other way round.
If someone HAS cloned your SIM, and both phones are attached at the same time, the network would register a fault, as a SINGLE sim number is assiciated at two different locations. It woudl create a fault in the system which would prevent both yours and the clone SIM from working. This is actually one of the main reasons why Cellphones are not usable on Planes (even if it is prooven to be safe to the electronics). The phone woudl try to log onto multiple cells at the same time, causing a lot of strain on the network, or even malfunction.
A SIM can only be "effectively" cloned if the original was never used afterwards. If both the Original SIM and the Clone was used at the same time, the network will try and continuesly switch between the two cells its registered to, unless both are on the same cell. if both are on the same cell, further issues would happen.
I am not sayign that cloning is impossible, its just extremely unlikely.
I woudl think the most likely causes of this situation are:
- Are you *sure* your partner is not recieving the calls? Really sure?
- Maybe, if you visited another country (or performed roaming) there might be some residual temporary numbers assigned to your phone.
However, the way the records are kept, you shoudl find that its pretty easy for the phone company to determine what happend. Who made the phone call, what handset was in use, where the call was recieved.
Finally I do not know the laws of the US, but here in the UK, the first point of call if you think your phone has been cloned or if your believe that a crime has been committed regarding your phone is the POLICE.
In UK, if we recieve am abusive call, calling the phone company will not be any help. They will rightly ask you to contact the police first, and they will work with the police to resolve the matter.
Have a nice day!
I work for one of the top 5 American cell phone providers specifically in the department that maintains the billing system. This is the suite of systems that go from switch records to taxed and formatted bills to be sent off to the printing houses (as well as roamer records to be shipped off to other providers, records for partners, etc.)
Let me tell you something you may not realize -- all of these systems have bugs. Some of them are horrible bugs. Bugs like ringtones getting double-taxed or calls getting billed when you ring a number but don't get an answer with absolutely no way to tell the difference between a legit call and a call that didn't answer.
Some of these bugs are due to flaws within the billing system. Some are bugs in the switch data (the absolute worst kind because there's no good way to filter the data when good and bad records are all marked up the same). Some are tables screw ups that lead to entire bills getting mangled. Some of these bugs get caught by the bill checking department and others may go for months without being noticed until a customer complains.
"Number unavailable" calls are most likely from records that were sent to the billing system with no other party number populated (or populated with some default "we don't know what this is" value). Our system simply replaces the other number with your own number and keeps going. Other providers probably cover for it in some other way as well.
What you have may in fact be legit phone calls that had mangled or incomplete switch records or records from the inter-carrier clearinghouse. Alternately, you may have junk data that you don't deserve to be billed for. It's all up how your company handles such complaints on what to do with about it. I know that my company frequently requests us to go find how many customers were affected and by how much so that we can either strip records from the bills and rerun them or go back and credit the customers proactively. We always try to err on the side of underbilling rather than overbilling customers because it's better to lose some money up front and give customers a pleasant surprise rather than after a nasty lawsuit with all the bad publicity.
However, if T-Mobile hangs up on you, that just isn't right. Call them up and simply say that you'd like to dispute the charges and have their billing team investigate where the records came from. That'll probably lead to a bug report being filed somewhere in their bureaucracy and a fix for you and others having the same problem. If they give you crap, then switch providers. It's not like there aren't multiple GSM service providers in the US now.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, contacting the company they may be able to resolve the immeadiate problem of the bills, and issue a replacement SIM. The can only deal with abuse of the system, but not with a crime. Only the authorities can do that.
Here is a good example of a call I did very recently with T-Mobile, and BT. I started recieving abusive calls on both my Mobile, and my landline, with an anonymous number. I reported to both companies, who noted down the call, and ensured that evidence will be kept. then they asked me to contact the police with my details to take it further. They were unable to tell me who was doing it, without police intervention. hey both offered to change my number if I wished.
I contacted the police, and as part of the investigation, the POlice authorised a line monitor on both my lane line and my mobile, as well as records on the lines. I was then contacted by BT and T-Mobile seperately explaining how the line monitor works.
in some cases, BT may be able to respond to certain abuses quicker directly, as they own the entire network, including the lines going into your house. But with regard to a crime (which is what cloning/makign abusive calls are) they refer you to the police as well.
PS. I dont understand what part of my original post is "flamebait", as someone has modded it.
Have a nice day!
Just one little problem with your hypotheses. You're going to a STORE for this information. If you want that data, you need to go past retail, past even customer service, and up the chain of command. The FBI would never start an investigation by requesting call records from a STORE.
Third and Finally - Even though TV tells you that cell phone triangulation is a common practice, it's not. Triangulating on a cell phone call requires police, on foot, with three antennas, to find the right signal and take a measurement, from there they sit down with a map and work it out. This isn't built into the phone system, and its certainly not automatic. One reason for this is that one of the better ways to triangulate a signal is to measure the signal strength - if cell phone providers measured signal strength at all their towers consumer groups could gain access to those records durring the disclosure period of a civil suit to prove that large regions of their networks do not work sufficently.
Really? Wow. Thanks for telling me this. Nice to know it's complete rubbish. I work for a telco, and the guys across the dividers from us do live call tracing and mobile location all the time. It takes about 5-10 minutes and is usually accurate to within 200 metres. The neat part about GSM is that as your phone uses timeslots, the delay can be measured between your phone and the tower (like a ping). You then know how far away the phone is from the tower (because radio waves travel at a known speed). You phone is also always in contact with more than one cell station at a time. Add up all three factors (timeslow, delay, and different locations) and the system gives you a street name and approximate number.
Of course, this is all done after a an official document comes through with what circumstances. Usually it's for people threatening suicide. Every now and again it's a kidnapping or something major. It's harsh on these guys when their call trace comes back too late and the news the next day shows that 2 kids were kidnapped by their dad and murdered. True story - give these guys some credit.
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