Clone Phone Story

x-no-archive: yes

For five days calls were made to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. My
pre-tax bill went from $35 to $500.

They caught it, and had me re-program my phone and said don't worry about
the bill.

Apparently when you roam in an analogue network, all your info can be picked
up.

Puerto Rico is included in my plan, but the Dominican Republic is $1 a
minute. Why would anybody pay that much when they could get a pre-paid phone
card? Talk about asleep at the switch. How come they couldn't pick this up
in a day or two ?

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› See More: Clone Phone Story

"ii" <iii> wrote in news:[email protected]:

> Why would anybody pay that much when they could get a
> pre-paid phone card?

Why would anyone pay anything when they can clone your phone?

In article <[email protected]>, "ii" <iii> says...
> x-no-archive: yes
>=20
> For five days calls were made to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. =
My
> pre-tax bill went from $35 to $500.
>=20
> They caught it, and had me re-program my phone and said don't worry about
> the bill.
>=20
> Apparently when you roam in an analogue network, all your info can be pic=
ked
> up.
>=20
> Puerto Rico is included in my plan, but the Dominican Republic is $1 a
> minute. Why would anybody pay that much when they could get a pre-paid ph=
one
> card? Talk about asleep at the switch. How come they couldn't pick this u=
p
> in a day or two ?
>=20
>=20
>=20

Very true. Phone ID information is sent "in the clear" in an analog=20
network. It's only encrypted when it's speaking CDMA, so to speak. If=20
a CDMA phone is going to get cloned, that's when it will happen.

--=20
R=D8=DF
O/Siris
~+~
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be.
Moderation in temper is always a virtue,
but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man", 1792

ii wrote:

> For five days calls were made to the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. My
> pre-tax bill went from $35 to $500.
>
> They caught it, and had me re-program my phone and said don't worry about
> the bill.

Bravo for Sprint. I've had experiences with Verizon where even now,
Verizon waffles at times on whether they expect me to pay a $2500 cell
phone bill from 1995 for calls to Zimbabwe and other nations on the
African continent that I never made.

> Apparently when you roam in an analogue network, all your info can be picked
> up.

Yes it can. The same goes for content. If you must roam in analog,
assume that everything you say is being eavesdropped on, because it can
be. So avoid giving out credit card numbers or any sensitive
information unless your on Sprint's network, or at the very least,
roaming in digital.

> Puerto Rico is included in my plan, but the Dominican Republic is $1 a
> minute. Why would anybody pay that much when they could get a pre-paid phone
> card?

They didn't; that's why your phone was cloned and your account
information used.

If it's any comfort though, i imagine that calls to the Dominican
republic on Sprint's network might be a bit less, since roaming charges
were most likely factored into your now-wiped-out bill.

> Talk about asleep at the switch. How come they couldn't pick this up
> in a day or two ?

Any number of reasons. The most likely being that when roaming, it
takes several days, sometimes up to a month, before a roaming partner
will finally get around to passing the billing data for roaming calls to
Sprint. Until they have that data, Sprint can't detect anything.

--
E-mail fudged to thwart spammers.
Transpose the c's and a's in my e-mail address to reply.

Why would anyone call the Domenican Republic? They don't even speak English
there.
>

Just Me wrote:
> Why would anyone call the Domenican Republic? They don't even speak English
> there.

Uhhhh... There are plenty of people in the USA whose native language is
Spanish. Many of them are from Central America.

--
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