Criminals embrace cell-phone technology

By Tony Smith

Associated Press

SAO PAULO, Brazil — They’re used in Brazil to organize prison riots, kidnappings and murders, while in Vietnam they’re a drug dealer’s best friend. In the remote Scottish highlands, they serve as an early warning device for vandals to avoid the village constable.

Cell phones are fast becoming a favored accessory for crooks.

Now, with the arrival of prepaid handsets that can be bought "off the peg" at supermarkets or gas stations — unregistered and difficult to trace — organized crime has yet another weapon.

To combat fraud and other illicit phone use, wireless carriers are building databases and starting to profile suspicious cell phones, similar to the way detectives profile criminal suspects.

Brazil has even debated banning prepaid mobile phones altogether.

"Organized crime uses prepaid mobiles a lot. Crooks need communications that are hard to trace," said Ross Anderson, a security engineering expert at Britain’s Cambridge University.

"Most of the illicit use is to cheat telecom carriers out of revenue, but there are also strong links to the drug trade, the arms trade and terrorism," said Charles Freire at the Brasilia offices of FML, a telecommunications fraud and security consultancy.

According to the official Voice of Vietnam radio, narcotics police last year busted 55 drug syndicates, and in one swoop seized more than 120 cell phones.

Last week, Ireland’s Special Criminal Court sentenced Colm Murphy, an anti-British militant, to 14 years in jail for aiding the 1998 Irish Republican Army car-bomb attack on Omagh that killed 29 people and wounded more than 300. Murphy was found guilty partly thanks to complex telecommunications evidence that proved his cell phone had been used to help deliver the bomb and mislead police.

On Black Isle in the remote Scottish highlands, councilor Alex Jack says gangs use cell phones to play cat-and-mouse with the community’s four policemen during weekend rampages that leave shop windows smashed and gas stations vandalized.

"They all have mobile phones," Jack said. "As soon as one of them picks up the police, they call the others and they clear out and move on to the next village."

In Brazil, the criminal use of wireless is more sinister and deadly.

A year ago, about 20,000 inmates in 29 jails across Sao Paulo state staged the country’s largest prison riot, killing 16 prisoners and taking 8,000 others hostage. The rebellion, authorities said, was coordinated by prepaid cell phones smuggled into jails. The calls could not be traced.

Add to that the use of cell phones in a spate of violent kidnappings in Sao Paulo that spiraled to 267 last year from 63 in 2000 and it’s easy to understand why last week, after a popular mayor was kidnapped and executed, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso called prepaid phones "an instrument of crime" and threatened to ban them.

He quickly backed down, because pay-as-you go wireless has been embraced universally by poor Brazilians. Of the country’s 29 million cell phones, nearly 20 million are prepaid. Wireless operators rely on prepaid services for 65 percent of their revenue.

"The prepaid phone isn’t just the bad guy here," said FML’s Freire. "It’s a revolutionary product that has democratized communications."

And not just in developing nations like Brazil. In Italy, about 80 percent of cell phones are prepaid; in Portugal, 70 percent.

But that shows that combating crime involving wireless is a global problem, argues Freire. He thinks third-generation mobile handsets now debuting, with robust data-transmission capabilities, "will open the doors for other, more sophisticated types of crime."

So what can be done?

"The itemized phone bill has long been a powerful investigative tool," Anderson said.

While pay-as-you-call cell phones don’t have bills, buyers could at least be forced to produce identification at purchase, Freire said.

Network operators are already swapping information about suspicious numbers — phones that make frequent calls to known offshore tax havens or known drug trade strongholds, he added.

In Britain, police blame a steep rise in violent street crime on cell phone theft. More than 700,000 cell phones were stolen last year, and in one high-profile attack on New Year’s Day, a 19-year-old girl was shot in the head after handing over her phone to a robber.

A recent government report urged cell phone manufacturers to consider boosting security on the next handset generation.

Voice authentication is an option.

Domain Dynamics Ltd., a British company, has patented voice authentication software that, according to marketing manager Martin George, has been sufficiently compacted to fit on chips in handsets and on the SIM security cards used on GSM networks "for a matter of a few tens of cents a phone."

Phones loaded with the software will only work once they recognize the owner’s voice. With global positioning satellite technology, they can also be traceable to within 10 meters, George said.

"Your voice is like your fingerprint, everybody’s is unique," George said.