Cell Phone Fraud
In today’s marketplace, there are so many cell phones and cell phone service providers that many consumers do not know one from another. This has led to the crime of cell phone fraud becoming more frequent.
The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) defines cell phone fraud as the unauthorized use, tampering, or manipulation of a cell phone or service. As this crime began to rise in the 1990s, the Wireless Telephone Protection Act was passed in 1998 to criminalize the use, possession, manufacture, or sale of hardware or software used to clone fraudulent cell phones. This cloning is a type of cell phone fraud.
Every cell phone has a unique factory-set electronic serial number (ESN) and its own telephone number. Certain people will illegally monitor radio transmissions from the cell phones of legitimate subscribers. These individual then can create a cloned cell phone, which is a cell phone that has been reprogrammed to transmit the serial number and phone number of another legitimate cell phone. As both the cell phone and its clone have the same identifying numbers, the cellular system can not distinguish the difference. The legitimate subscriber who owns the original cell phone will end up getting billed for calls from both the phones. The agency warns that if when you receive your monthly cell phone bill and there are charges on it that you do not recognize, you should contact your cell phone service provider immediately.