[1684] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Telco reason for crypto in cellphones
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Haskin)
Fri Oct 3 00:33:05 1997
Date: Fri, 03 Oct 1997 00:21:33 -0400
From: Brian Haskin <haskin@ptway.com>
To: Cryptography Mail list <cryptography@c2.net>
Hmm, looks like an excellent opportunity for someone to point out how
crypto would save them from all this fraud.
Brian Haskin <haskin@ptway.com>
Taken from Yahoo Reuters
Thursday October 2 3:08 PM EDT
U.S. Cell Phone Industry Battles Service Thieves
By Brad Liston
ORLANDO, Fla. - Thousands of cellular telephone users have had the
unfortunate experience of opening their monthly bills
and finding hundreds of dollars in charges for calls they did not make.
The good news for them is that such fraud is way down, according to
delegates to a conference of the U.S. wireless telephone
industry Wednesday.
But the bad news is that wireless thieves are getting more
sophisticated.
The criminal customer will never go away," warned Roseanna DeMaria, vice
president for business security at AT&T Corp.
Wireless Services. He'll just engage in some very creative R&D."
At the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association's Fraud '97
conference, industry leaders said the theft of wireless
services in 1996 had dropped to 3 percent of annual revenues.
In the early 1990s, that number was 6 percent.
There currently are about 50 million wireless customers in the United
States.
Before 1995, stealing a cell phone signal was as simple as standing
outside a shopping mall in an area with heavy cellular traffic
and picking up a signal that could be reprogrammed into another phone to
make it look as if its calls were coming from a
legitimate account.
New technologies are making that more difficult, said Thomas McClure,
the association's director of fraud management.
For example, wireless service providers can now match an electronic
serial number unique to a digital wireless phone with
another identification number unique to each account in a system similar
to the military's friend and foe" technology. If someone
uses an account on an unauthorized phone, he trips a computer that
alerts the service provider.
Thanks to that technology, called radio frequency fingerprinting,
cellular thieves who could once promise service for 30 days
before phone companies caught on now can promise only about three days.
For older analog phones, the industry is becoming more adept at spotting
changes in customer patterns. If your account
suddenly shows, say, three calls a day to Bangladesh, then a computer
will recognize that, and someone will contact you to
confirm the calls," McClure said.
Law enforcement sources say the ranks of cellular thieves include the
usual suspects -- drug smugglers, organized crime figures
and criminal fugitives, among others.
The professional criminal is clearly going after our service," McClure
said. He wants to become the invisible man. "
So where do criminals, whose expertise may lie more along the line of
cutting cocaine or breaking thumbs, find people sharp
enough to steal cutting-edge technology?
They recruit it," Jeff Nelson, spokesman for the Cellular
Telecommunications Industry Association, said. We're up against some
of the best minds in the nation."
Copyright, Reuters Ltd. All rights reserved
Copyright © 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or
redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the
prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any
errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance
thereon
