Mobile Phone Number Hijacking

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I have had two friends who have had pre-paid mobile phone sim cards and their numbers were stolen right from under them. They didn't loose their phone just one day they realized they could not make calls on their phone. If friends called they might get a Chinese person for a period of time at least until the money ran out on the sim card.

I think the people doing this are getting more sophisticated because the second time this happened I got a message from my friend's number in Chinese asking me help buy some prepaid cards and send the passwords to recharge. Since my friend doesn't send me messages in Chinese I knew that something must be wrong and that it was a scam.

After their numbers were stolen my friends had no recourse but to change their number as they did not have the original packaging for the sim card. How wide spread is this phenomenon? How are these people robbing these phone numbers? Is it because my friends threw away the packaging for the SIM and some garbage scavenger retrieved it?

I haven't found any postings about this scheme on the net so I would like to start a discussion about how it is being accomplished and how to prevent it and if there is anyway to recover your number when it happens?

Comments

I know that was done on

Submitted by vpashkov on November 12, 2008 - 11:50.

I know that was done on first generation phones. I don't know principal on GSM network. But in first generation, smart guys were nodding old Motorola phones converting them into scanners with memory cells. So you take a phone like that, stop at the busy restaurant or other public place where people actively use their phones and put it into scanning mode. It checks all active frequencies, decodes and codes, stored the (ie 5) codes in memory cells and hat's it. When you make a call from this device it randomly picks a cell with stored information and you call for free. Every time it picks another cell so it is hard to locate a crook.

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