How anonymous are Pre-Paid cellphones?
michaelbee123
Semo-Regulars
So, I went to a local walmart and bought pre-paid AT&T Go Phone and a refill card using cash.
Now, say I did something illegal, like Icalled a phonesex line using someone's CC information or called in a bomb threat somewhere.
How easily could they trace this back to me? I noticed that when I bought the phone, the registered flashed "Activating...."
So I'm assuming they have a record of when and where this phone was bought. But say, worse scenario, they figure out where it was,
find a surveillance photo of me purchasing it. What are the odds they would actually catch me and that the evidence would hold up in court?
I know that it probably wouldn't be worth it for them to come after me for something as stupid as phone sex, but I was just curious.
I read somewhere that only 1% of CC fraud cases actually are prosecuted?
Now, say I did something illegal, like Icalled a phonesex line using someone's CC information or called in a bomb threat somewhere.
How easily could they trace this back to me? I noticed that when I bought the phone, the registered flashed "Activating...."
So I'm assuming they have a record of when and where this phone was bought. But say, worse scenario, they figure out where it was,
find a surveillance photo of me purchasing it. What are the odds they would actually catch me and that the evidence would hold up in court?
I know that it probably wouldn't be worth it for them to come after me for something as stupid as phone sex, but I was just curious.
I read somewhere that only 1% of CC fraud cases actually are prosecuted?
Comments
They know exactly when and where you payed for it. If they want to go through all the effort they could find you with the surveillance cam.
I seriously doubt the big chain stores keep their recordings for more than a few days. It takes dozens of gigabytes a day to do that. Too expensive.
The best way is to buy the cards in some back store alley store that doesn't save surveillance recordings. Most of those cheap cams just live stream but don't save.
Easy to get around.
Just buy the sim cards from a petrol station, put it in a random phone (ebay, hock shop) and when they ask for you licence number give them any 9 digit number. They take the number and run it through vedacheck (formerly baycorp) to see if your bankrupt, if your not the CSR just clicks on through and you now have a phone account.
Of course, the feds could track the phone back to the store you bought it from and could conceivably, determine who you are from surveillance security video (is you car's license plate fully viewable in the parking lot?) But that is such a long-shot, and you would have to be carding 10's of thousands or prank-calling the White House for them to go to that trouble.
The far easier means of finding you would be to access the phones cell tower records to get an approximate location for you, or access the E911 system, which gives them the phones location, or access the gps record from the telco, or use a device the police have available to themselves called a Stingray, which literally tricks any cell phone into connecting to it (by impersonating a cell tower) and giving them your exact location. Then it's just a matter of busting your door down.
They can also overlay your geolocation as provided by the cell towers/telco and compare it to map plot, if your cell phone's coordinates overlap with your home, they can pretty well figure out you're a resident of said home. They may not know who you are, but they'll know where you are.
Again though, you'd have to be carding a lot for them to go to this level. That said, it's always better to take extra precautions than get caught so easily.