THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 17, 1995 TAG: 9501170334
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LARRY W. BROWN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 102 lines
When June Miller got into her car one morning this month, she discovered someone had stolen her cellular phone. She then realized that the thief could have been charging calls to her number for nearly 12 hours.
``They could have talked to anyone in California or Japan or anywhere in the whole wide world,'' said Miller, a Norfolk certified public accountant.
She reported the theft to the police and to Contel Cellular, which agreed to erase any illegal calls from her bill.
``I will never know if they made two calls or 20,'' she said.
For those 12 hours - at 33 cents a minute for local calls - Miller's bill could have equaled a small fortune. Long-distance charges could have boosted the bill even higher.
The day Miller's phone was stolen, two other cellular phone thefts were reported in Norfolk. The phones - often left in plain view inside cars - are easy targets.
Often, thieves don't steal the phones for their value, which can range anywhere from $20 to $600. They just want to make as many calls as possible before the owner reports the theft and the phone's distinctive signal is deactivated.
These electronic joy-riders call as many friends, relatives and business contacts as they can until the company cuts off the signal. They then toss that phone aside and move on to the next victim.
More sophisticated criminals, operating mostly in other parts of the country, use electronic devices to capture these radio-signal codes. The captured numbers are then encoded in other phones, and illegal calls can be made at someone else's expense.
``What they're stealing is the most precious commodity we have - air time,'' said Mike Houghton, a spokesman for the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association in Washington.
When thieves crowd the airways with illegal calls, Houghton said, legitimate customers can be blocked from making emergency calls.
A thief will run up hundreds, even thousands of dollars in calls before discarding a phone, said Susan Boatwright, Hampton Roads manager for Sprint Cellular. She said Sprint gets about 10 phone-theft reports a month in the region.
This theft of phone service amounts to about $1 million a day nationwide, according to Houghton's organization and the Federal Communications Commission. Individual victims of cellular phone theft don't pay this enormous bill. However, some of the cost of trying to trace thieves is spread among all subscribers.
To stop the cellular bleeding, radio-telephone companies use computer software to watch for suspicious phone use, said David Lane, general manager of Contel, Hampton Roads' other cellular carrier.
``Our fraud-alert group monitors increased activity,'' Lane said. ``If that doesn't match the customer's historical pattern, it sends up a red flag.''
Lane said the company then tries to contact the customer to see whether the calls are legitimate.
Another tipoff is an unusual number of hang-ups received on a cellular phone. That may be an indication that a thief may have that phone's password number.
Cellular phones are one of the fastest-growing industries in the country, with more than 20 million users, Lane said. In 1994, the industry grew more than 60 percent.
Thieves have cashed in on this skyrocketing popularity. Lou Thurston, a Virginia Beach police spokesman, estimated thefts in that city have doubled in the past year. He had no exact numbers.
``One big reason is more and more people have cellular phones,'' he said.
Some cellular phone customers don't know that they are theft victims until the bill arrives. They are the victims of high-tech robbers of 11-digit ESN - electronic serial numbers.
``This is major technological fraud that we don't experience in this area,'' said Sprint's Boatwright. ``We haven't had any cases here in the past year.''
But in larger metropolitan areas, such as New York and Miami, thieves use electronic gadgets similar to radar detectors to zoom in on passing cellular phone users and capture electronic serial numbers.
Thousands of ``cloned'' telephones, rigged to use stolen ESNs, exist in the country, said Jerry Freeman, head of the Norfolk FCC office.
``Most of the cloning is being used by the drug industry and by immigrants calling home out of the country,'' he said.
Legitimate phone users are powerless to stop thieves from stealing their numbers, Freeman said. But they can protect themselves by not leaving phones in plain sight in cars, by reporting thefts immediately and by buying insurance.
In 1990, a national cellular phone fraud task force - comprising more than 5,000 federal, state and local law-enforcement officials - was formed.
These agents catch phone pirates by tracing calls, said Houghton, the industry spokesman. They also rely on street informants, who sometimes lead them to ``boiler room'' operations offering cut-rate calls on phones using stolen numbers.
``By cracking down we're waging the high-tech war against the high-tech crook,'' Houghton said. ``I think if we let this go unchecked it could seriously cripple the industry.
``But we're showing progress in many areas. We're putting a lot of people out of business and behind bars.'' ILLUSTRATION: The new joy riders
JOHN CORBITT/Staff
KEYWORDS: THEFT CELLULAR PHONES by CNB