Are your mobile phone bills unexpectedly high? There’s a chance you are the victim of ‘‘mobile cloning’’. It is also known as cell phone piracy and has been taking place throughout the world since decades. Recently this crime has come to India.
Mobile phones have become a major part of our everyday life. On the one hand, India’s mobile phone market has grown rapidly in the last few years on the back of falling phone tariffs and handset prices, making it one of the fastest growing markets globally. On the other the number of mobile phone subscribers is exceeding that of fixed-line users. The mobile phone subscriber base has already crossed the 50-mn mark.
Today millions of mobile phones users, be it Global System for Mobile communication (GSM) or Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA), run the risk of having their phones cloned. And the worst part is that there isn’t much that you can do to prevent this.
Such crime first came to light in January 2005 when the Delhi police arrested a person with 20 cell phones, a laptop, a SIM scanner, and a writer. The accused was running an exchange illegally wherein he cloned CDMA-based mobile phones. He used software for the cloning and provided cheap international calls to Indian immigrants in West Asia. A similar racket came to light in Mumbai resulting in the arrest of four mobile dealers