Your cell phone records for sale - $100

[saintjohn]

Web sites selling your cell phone records for just $100

BY TED PHILLIPS
amNewYork
Posted January 16 2006, 2:07 PM EST

You may already be a victim of cellular "records rip-off" and not even know it.

Anyone -- a stalker, a jealous lover, a curious employer -- with merely your cell-phone number can visit one of several Web sites, pay around $100, and in a few hours find out whom you've been calling and who's been calling you.

Indeed, the Web site Americablog revealed last week that it successfully obtained the records of Gen. Wesley Clark, the former presidential candidate.

"All we needed was General Clark's cell phone number and our credit card, and 24 hours later we had one hundred calls the general made on his cell phone in November," according to a posting on the site, which said it contacted Clark about its efforts to expose the dangers of the practice, which is in a legal gray area.

The problem has prompted lawsuits and increasing attention from lawmakers, but some 40 or so companies have kept at it.

"If you have a legitimate need you can get these records, the problem is these companies are offering an illegal shortcut that is unfair to the consumer," said Chris Hoofnagle, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy advocacy organization.

Hoofnagle said he believes these companies are violating federal laws by engaging in deception in commerce. Hoofnagle said that he believes most of the records are bought by jealous spouses or significant others.

Third parties are supposed to go to court to get phone records and have to convince a judge that those records are important to a legal case.

But for these companies, time may be running out.

On Friday, Cingular Wireless, the nation's largest cell-phone carrier, has received a temporary restraining order against 1st Source Information Spe******ts, a Florida firm that owns locatecell.com and several other Web sites that offer these records.

On the legislative front, House Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada on Friday called on the Federal Communications Commission to investigate how these companies are obtaining this information.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) plans to introduce legislation in the Senate tomorrow that would make it a felony to obtain customer information from a telephone-service provider by pretending to be someone else, a practice called "pretexting," widely believed to be a chief way these companies accessing the data.

The bill also would make it a crime for phone company employees to sell a customer's cell phone records.

"We are going to take every step to ensure that stealing cell-phone records is a criminal act, punishable by law," said Schumer in a statement. "We already have these protections for our financial information; we ought to have it for the very personal information that can be gleaned from our telephone records."

Lawmakers and privacy experts say the practice appears to violate existing laws, but there are presently no federal laws that ban the practice specifically.

Cingular sued 1st Source Information Spe******ts Inc. and its officers, Kenneth W. Gorman and Steven Schwartz, in an Atlanta federal district court in December. The suit also named locatecell.com's previous owner, Data Find Solutions, Inc.

Their suit alleges that the defendants obtained private customer information through "'social engineering,' improper hacking, and/or through unauthorized access to online account information stored on Cingular's databases."

More:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/loc...home-headlines

[V. Barbarino]

The media which is all over this, and now congress, so in a few months, this is all over with.. Plus all you need to do is tell your provider a password that no one can guess.

[240turbo]

Nothing is a secret. Absolutely nothing.