New Delhi, July 29 (IANS) Telecom service providers reported around 2,150 cases of misuse of mobile cloning in different parts of the country during 2009-2010, Telecom Minister A. Raja said in the Rajya Sabha Thursday.
‘The government has come to know through telecom service providers that approximately 2,150 cases of misuse of mobile cloning through duplication of subscriber identity in different parts of country have come to their notice during 2009-10,’ said Raja in the statement.
Mobile cloning refers to the act of copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another.
Subscriber identity can be cloned by the use of digital data interpreters (DDI). DDI are devices manufactured to intercept electronic serial number (ESN).
A hacker monitoring the radio wave transmission from the cell phones of legitimate subscribers can capture (ESN) without the knowledge of the subscriber.
Any call made to the cloned phone are billed and traced to a legitimate phone account. An individual thus ends up with unexpected monthly phone bills.
Though the process of cloning subscriber identity is a tedious task owing to the encryption mechanism used in mobile network, the government has stepped up monitoring through its fields units, the telecom enforcement, resource and monitoring (TERM) cells.
