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US Carriers Finally Doing Something About Cellphone Theft
New submitter zarmanto writes "In a move that is so long overdue that it boggles the mind, the FCC and the four largest cellular providers in the U.S. state that they will be joining forces to combat cell phone theft. From the article: 'Over the next six months, each of the four operators is expected to put in place a program to disable phones reported as stolen and within 18 months the FCC plans to help merge them into a central database in order to prevent a phone from being used on another carrier's network.'"
Report your friends phone as stolen! Hilarity ensues.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Isn't it a bit overkill to use the USS Nimitz to do something about cellphone theft?
So now were doing in the name of preventing cell phone theft. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against the proposal, it just seems to me that this could have been done years ago in the name of fighting terrorism. Cell phone theft must be costing someone money.
The long-overdue part is that the carriers will share this data so that one phone can't simply be switched to a different network (they have all already done this for their in-network phone database. However, given that most phones are only going to work when operating on the originally designed network anyway (given the patchwork of different standards and frequencies in use among the carriers) how many phone thefts is this really going to affect?
Long overdue, this technology has proven to reduce phone theft in places like Australia. Getting mugged for your phone is rapidly becoming very common in the US. There is a switch in every GSM system database designed for precisely this purpose. Its in the GSM specs. All these carriers are running the same call connection software. (Most of them are too clueless to have developed their own).
Why not turn it on WITHIN carriers in 45 days flat, and between carriers within 90 days? Some say there is money to be made by selling you a new phone, and the carriers were unwilling to forego that revenue stream. The thief (or the people who buy from the thieves) have to sign up for service, but they won't be buying any new phone with that service. Many also suggest that a good portion of the non-contract market is using stolen phones.
But turning this on is not hard. Carriers have been dragging their feet on this for decades.
The tinfoil hat in me expects the carriers to turn this into another way to make money, if not by charging a fee, then by using it as an excuse to not accept phones purchased elsewhere, or by insistin you bring your phone in for them to record the IMEI, and charging a fee to record it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Actually, I thought the same thing.
Last I checked. MEID/IMEIs reported as stolen are useless when trying to activate.
I bought a used cell phone long ago and come to find out it was a stolen phone and I could not get it activated.
Plus these identifies are easily cloned as you can buy MEID cloned phones in the black market.
somehow I saw this too..
You bet. You cell phone gets stolen you have a bunch of war jets over your head bombing you to kingdom come.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
We already have this type of system in Britain. Here we require the IMEI number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Mobile_Equipment_Identity to report a handset stolen. It's not something you typically have to hand.
If you don't have your IMEI number your carrier will have (last IMEI your SIM was attached to), and they can block the handset if you call up from another phone and authenticate with them like you usually would ("who do you call most?", "what's your mothers maiden name?", etc.) or report online from your carrier account.
Helps limit the value of a stolen phone and helps you avoid call charges against the account. As we're all GSM/SIM based, they usually pop a new SIM card in the post at the same time (though a new phone is obviously your (or your insurers) responsibility.
Welcome to the 20th century, US Mobile phone industry!
What timing! And here they're gonna be retiring the Enterprise soon.
Then the bad guys will find a bad guy who buys in bulk and have a system of shipping the phones to europe or such. just a few weeks ago police here caught couple of guys acting suspicious, followed them to their car where they had 30 some iphones in a box
I was hoping that a squadron of F-18s were on Combat Air Patrol just waiting to drop a laser guided bomb on the miscreant who had your stolen phone.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Another way for carriers to make another cockabillion dollars
For years, companies have been remotely bricking mobile devices that have been hacked. Why didn't these idiots do the same for devices that were reported stolen?!?
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
People on Slashdot are actually saying that the ability of a carrier to brick a telephone remotely is a GOOD thing?
My, how times have changed.
my throwaway tracfones, which cost less than $6 a month can be shitcanned at will... smartphones are for ID10Ts
Verizon Wireless, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile are joining forces
Anytime a corp tells me they want to help, experience(and corp law) tells me philanthropy is not even remotely their motive. When multi-corps start 'cooperating' for my benefit I get as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Besides being shocked that this is not already a standard practice, I'm going to predict the overhead for this stalwart effort is going to be too large to bear so some sort of profitable fix will follow...
A silver bullet to kill the used-phone market sure would help protect us, the customers, right?
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
I thought our aircraft carriers were for protecting abroad, not for domestic problems.... seems like bombing a cell phone thief is a bit drasti... OH. phone carriers. my bad.
A centralized government database of all cell phones with mac addresses, imei numbers and such. Should be even easier for them to do warrantless tracking of whomever they choose.
18 months to merge?
CREATE TABLE BLOCKED_CELLPHONES
(
IMEI TYPE ANY
)
There, hurry up and move this into production today.
the four only cellular providers in the U.S.
Fixed that for you.
This sounds like a great idea. Keep a record of all ESN's that are stolen devices and make it so none of these can be used on any carrier in the country. This would go a long way to reduce the trafficking of stolen phones. However, there needs to be some rules on what constitutes a "stolen" phone.
1. Carriers should not be able to disable a phone unless the owner has reported it stolen. (I.e. They cannot list phones that are on unpaid contracts, without compensation to the owner of the phone.)
2. The database must be available to check if an ESN was reported stolen, and if it is, return contact information for the owner or his agent.
3. The ESN must be removable from the list, if the owner of the phone requests it.
4. A means of transferring stolen ESN's between "owners" or "agents"
Somehow though, I don't think this is what the carriers have in mind. My guess is that they want to stop folks from getting expensive phones cheap on contract, then dumping the contract and selling the phone for quick cash. Being able to disable the phone on all US carriers would make this much harder to do.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Actually, it is the unexpected opportunity for the, um.. higher powers to create a database of all cell-phone owners. Without it, you could replace the SIM card in your cell phone and nobody would know who makes the call. With the database in place they will know whose cell phone a particular call was made from.
I have worked at Sprint in their retail stores. We would blacklist phone serials if customers told us. Friends from that time migrated to Verizon and I've heard they do the same. So the ability has existed for a while. It's been up to the customer to say something.
And making sure a phone won't work on another carrier is only useful between T-Mobile and AT&T.
Verizon and Sprint maintain a DB of phones they've "approved" and will not activate a device that isn't on that list. You cannot take a Verizon phone and activate it on Sprint, nor vice versa.
While I'm sure this will help, I don't see it as having a huge impact here in the US, thanks to how the carriers do business.
No sig for you!!
Ill bet money that if it didnt include the ability to not use a phone from one carrier on anothers network then none of them would have done it because this means you have to buy a phone from verizon to use verizon.
Look, it is hard enough these days to make a living. The US is looking at 30-40% permanent unemployment today and with the illegals still streaming in you know any job they can do they are going to get. Who wouldn't hire an illegal at half the wage? So plenty of people are looking at somewhat shady practices just to pay for food. I guess one way of limiting the problem is to make sure they can't pay for food, but that is another discussion...
So today you can nick a recent phone and sell it for hundreds of dollars. The carrier doesn't seem to care that it was recently someone else's phone. And if you can snag an iPhone that can be $200 or $300 in your wallet to feed your family. Before everyone gets all upset about endorsing crime, you have to understand that not all of these are violent muggings but the sort of thing where a careless person leaves their phone on table in a restaurant or a bar. Sure there are going to be some where a person is so incredibly desperate as to beat someone to a pulp in order to get their phone. But the alternative is starving.
Just think of that guy in Les Miserables stealing a loaf of bread. How different is this? Besides, we aren't talking about your everyday Joe but people with high-end phones that can clearly afford to buy another one. Ooops, they didn't back up their phone and lost all their pictures - sorry, but it sucks to learn about backups a little late.
Anyway, we should be encouraging more of this, especially the non-violent sort of theft, as there are really few other alternatives for the folks out there just trying to squeek by with whatever they can do. No skills, no rich relatives, you probably are going to be stealing stuff to survive.
Similarly, there needs to be a mechanism to UN-blacklist a phone. Quite often a phone is thought to be lost or stolen but then later turns up, is found or is returned by an honest finder, etc. Such phones need to be restored to usability.
Also the issue of transfer of ownership, and therefore transfer of the right to declare a phone "stolen", needs to be very carefully designed. Supposing I buy a used phone from CL or ebay. Somehow the ownership needs to transfer to me such that the seller CANNOT now declare that phone to be "stolen". However requiring that that newly sold phone be activated by a carrier to transfer ownership is NOT a good mechanism -- I shouldn't have to do that and it can cause all sorts of problems.
A list to keep a carriers phones off a competitors network? That'll never be abused...
you can blacklist IMEI numbers and have been able to cince the Cellular ONE days of 1989.
And honestly I have no idea why the iphone, ipad and ipod could not be blacklisted as well. this would make the street value of the stolen i devices to go ZERO.
connect stolen ipad to itunes, screen change to black with red "STOLEN PROPERTY, call 1-800-555-1212 for more information" and it's game over for thieves.
For some reason none of these companies want to do this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
After all, GM, Ford etc must have a responsibility to me to disable my stolen vehicle right? And what about thte company that made the boombox I had that was stolen? Why aren't they doing more?
... which is great fun, unless your phone happens to be lost under your bed/car seat/desk/etc...
The flaw in europe is phones are stolen, blocked and then make their way abroad south to Africa where the block does not apply.
But so long as the USA has no similar southern country it will all be just fine.
(It also makes ebay more exciting, will my purchase be blocked a month down the line?)
It seems "good" when they disable phones reported as stolen.
But I think most people would think it's "bad" if they disable phones reported as downloading "stolen" (i.e. copyrighted) content.
I'd prefer they only be allowed to disable phones with a court order (regardless of the reason for the order). If police and courts want to streamline a way to get the court order to the carrier in the case of stolen phones (with adequate judicial review), then I'm all for it. But I don't want carriers to become part of the policing effort. And doing it with our support and without considering our rights - i.e. disabling a phone is the equivalent of seizing our property.
For only $14.95 per month per phone.
Good luck with that. Mexico tried to set something like this up (RENAUT), didn't work cause carriers ended up balking, fearing it would hurt their bottom lines. After all. even if stolen and used for criminal activities, the miscreants still have to pay for their call time...
FAIL!
Why isn't the power to deactivate one's own phone in the hands of the owner rather than the phone company?
Why is Slashdot rejoicing in the ability of phone companies to brick phones at their choosing?
There should certainly be a way to keep this power solely in the hands of the phone's owner. For example, the owner could have something like a public crypto revocation certificate on hand that he could use in case the phone ever gets stolen, rather than be placed at the mercy of some phone company.
The way I read it, the database only covers stolen smartphones. What about "feature phones"? Someone cleaned out the girl's locker room at my daughter's high school last year. My daughter didn't lose her phone, but something like a half-dozen girls did. Why not take a swipe at petty theft as well as robbery while they're at it?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
The FCC and the top 4 carriers are doing this because they have a history of cooperation and working for their clients? They're using this to create a database of devices across all carriers. Think about it.
... they rely on something a little more sturdy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-powered_telephone - OK it's a backup system, but still... this is military grade material, when was the last time you held a phone that could do some real damage if you were to hit someone with it...
Hopefully they will make it public searchable, so if anyone buying someones used phone on craigslist or ebay can check the phone to see if it was stolen.
Is the goal to get your cell phone back, or is it to make a database of criminals to track?
"Find my iPhone" led to big drug busts sometimes when stupid thieves nicked an iPad. Now that we can't use gps tracking devices on suspects, how can a big brother keep track of criminals efficiently.
My expectation: phone recoveries will not go up, but phone thefts will go down. The IQ of thieves arrested for phone theft will go down as well.
I know one person who makes good money legally buying used iPhones from the local classifieds, and sending them to other countries to sell, as they are worth MORE in the other countries.
As foreign providers are unlikely to follow the US carriers' database, criminals can still benefit from that market.
what next - the sailors will be stealing F-18s
I bought a phone off ebay that was supposedly new and clean. I took it into a vzw store to register it, and they told me the ESN was coming back as stolen. At that point I asked if they could take the phone and return it to the person who had it stolen. "We don't get involved in these matters". Could they email them, call them, contact them? "We don't get involved in these matters". What if I call the police and give them the phone, will you give them the customer information so they can get them their phone back? "We won't help the police without a warrant".
What a bunch of fucking crooks. The only reason they "don't get involved" is because they make money selling a replacement phone. It should be criminal for them to refuse to notify the owner of the property that their stolen property had been recovered.
IIn this tiny south american country the 3 cellphone carriers are doing this since 2011. Cellphones are stolen anyway, it takes time to reduce theft. But is the right way.
You are just as big a moron as the previous poster who thought they were being clever. Go choke on a bucket of dicks.
I am sure it's nothing a quick root can't fix.
No, seriously, the rest of the world (well, Europe, at least), has had cross-carrier stolen device blocking for well over a decade. So ... America is being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the late 1990s?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"