Cell phone owners: Beware of the clones

It can happen anywhere: Lisa Laabs' cell phone was cloned in Nuevo Progreso; Jacky Pauken's cell phone was cloned in Florida.

About three weeks after Laabs returned to Wisconsin from visiting her parents in Port Isabel, a representative of her cell phone service provider contacted her to ask if she'd been in Nuevo Progreso, Mexico.

Laabs said she was taken aback that Alltel Wireless would know that she had visited the border town on Feb. 12.

Alltel, she said, told her that the company knew of her travels because its fraud department had discovered more than 100 calls from Laabs' cell phone number coming from Nuevo Progreso.

Alltel informed Laabs that her cell phone had been "cloned."

"I know I didn't make any calls from Mexico," Laabs said Thursday from her home outside Appleton, Wis.

She also said she hadn't received her most recent bill, so she wasn't aware of the calls from Mexico charged to her phone.

Alltel would not charge her for the fraudulent calls, she said, but her cell phone needed to be re-programmed.

Jackie Pauken, from Ohio who spends the winter in Port Isabel, said her cell phone was cloned when she visited Florida in December.

In her case, Alltel contacted her at her home in Ohio after the company saw five phone calls from Monterrey, Mexico, from a phone cloned with her cell phone's electronic codes.

"I haven't been to Monterrey in three years," Pauken said Friday. "I was very fortunate that Alltel caught it right away."

Erwin, at Alltel's fraud department in Raleigh, N.C., would not provide his last name, but said the problem of cell phone cloning is not limited to any one cell phone service or to any particular brand of cell phone. All cell phones are susceptible to cloning, and all wireless phone services are vulnerable to it.

None of the mobile phone companies contacted would comment about the extent of the cloning problem, but Erwin said Alltel deals with "many" incidents every week.

He explained how a phone is cloned.

Someone with a device that scans for the electronic cell phone signals locates a signal and captures the codes, Erwin said, adding that the cell phone does not need to be in use to emit a signal. As long as the phone is "powered up," it is emitting a signal that can be captured and programmed into another cell phone.

The phone then becomes a "clone" of the phone from which the codes were copied.

The device used by phone cloners can be assembled from components costing between $1,500 and $2,000 that are purchased from electronics retailers, Erwin said. The phone cloner can retrieve a cell phone signal from as far as a mile away, depending on the sophistication of the scanning device.

Alltel's fraud department offered to instruct Laabs over the phone how she could re-program her phone to stop the calls from the clone, but Laabs chose to take her phone to the local Alltel office where a technician re-programmed it for her. The process took less than 10 minutes, she said.

The Alltel technician in Wisconsin who re-programmed Laabs' phone told her that he'd dealt with other cloning problems from Nuevo Progreso.

Mexico, the US-Mexico border region and New York City are "heavy problem areas," Erwin said.

But phone cloning can happen anywhere. Erwin said he's heard of phone cloners who will scan for cell phone signals while sitting in a parked car or at a restaurant at a busy truck stop along an interstate highway.

Alltel, he said, aggressively monitors its customers' cell phone use, looking for unusual calling patterns and locations that can suggest fraud. In many cases, Alltel customers are notified before they receive their bills, which was the case with both Laabs and Pauken.

In an e-mail response to questions about cell phone cloning, a spokesman for T-Mobile recommended the use of passwords to protect customers' cell phones.

"We believe that with the appropriate use of passwords and other simple safety precautions, T-Mobile customers should not be concerned about the security of their devices, their personal data or account information," the spokesman said.

The e-mail also stated that T-Mobile will investigate and prosecute unauthorized access to T-Mobile service and has invested millions of dollars to continue to reinforce its system to address customers' security.

AT&T spokeswoman April Borlinghaus wrote in an e-mail seeking comment on cell phone cloning, "AT&T has a variety of security measures in place to protect consumers from this practice, but we really can't comment on them specifically."

Sprint did not return a phone call seeking comment.

The problem of phone cloning was solved briefly when cell phones switched from analog to digital technology, Erwin said. Eventually, phone cloners were able to crack into digital wireless service.

"We try to stay ahead of the criminals," he said.