Are your cellphone bills unexpectedly high? There’s a chance you are the victim of ‘‘mobile cloning’’.
This tech crime involves copying the unique markers of one cellphone onto another. Calls made from the second will now be indistinguishable from those made from the first. The service provider will, of course, bill them to the actual client — the victim who wakes up only when he sees a detailed bill and finds numbers he’s never called.
In India mobile cloning first came to light last month, when a service provider in Delhi lodged a police complaint and a racket was unearthed. A similar racket was bust in Mumbai. Four cellphone dealers were arrested.
Service providers in Gujarat insist this swindle isn’t common in the state. They say ‘‘no official complaint has been received.’’ But cellphone dealers, especially those dealing in second-hands, say mobile cloning is not entirely absent here. Experts explained how mobile cloning is carried out.
Each cellphone has an erasable-programmable read-only memory (EPROM), its nucleus as it were. Embedded in this chip are the cellphone’s electronic serial number (ESN) and electronic machine identification number (EMIN), comparable to the DNA that makes an individual unique.
Unscrupulous cellphone dealers and repairers who have access to the ESN and EMIN of someone’s cellphone may offer it to mobile cloners. Sometimes the information is obtained from service providers. Using special software, the cloner embeds these numbers on the EPROM of another cellphone, from which a user can make calls for which someone else pays.
One cellphone dealer in the Navrangpura area said mobile cloning is mainly done on CDMA phones. He said the software package used is called Patagonia, and that he knew someone who had sourced it from Mumbai. The software package is also available with some dealers in Surat and Vadodara.
‘‘Mobile cloning is quite common abroad. It’s been on there for a decade,’’ he said. ‘‘But only recently did mobile cloning come to India. Lots of details on the topic are available on the Internet. But the recent arrests and the exposure have made the few dealers having cloning software go slow.