CENTRAL U.S. -- Aircard & Fraudulent Voice Charges

[AndiLou1970]

Hi All,

I am a telecom audit analyst who cares for about 500 wireless devices and something has happened that I have never had happen before so please excuse my ignorance on the matter - but... on my most recent Sprint PCS invoice, I have an aircard what was charged $16,000 worth of voice calls from Miami, FL to Jamaica.

I work for a company which is located only in Texas (we're not nationally based). Granted, the user of the card could have been in Miami but was not. She has also had the device in her possession.

My question is, how can this be possible? Could Sprint have made a mistake on the billing or could more sinister events have happened? Is it possible to "steal" a phone number?

My rep at Sprint and her superiors are researching this on their end but I am curious as to what I can do to investigate here. I'm not a "devious" minded person so am not thinking like a "techie-criminal."

Furthermore, as I look at the invoice details, it appears the "person" using the number is on the phone 24/7 with calls ranging from 1 to 45 minutes (mostly 1 minute) with no real breaks in time.

Any help is appreciated. I'm not paying this part of the invoice (obviously) until the investigation is over.

Thanks,
Andi

[diver236]

Originally Posted by AndiLou1970 Hi All, I am a telecom audit analyst who cares for about 500 wireless devices and something has happened that I have never had happen before so please excuse my ignorance on the matter - but... on my most recent Sprint PCS invoice, I have an aircard what was charged $16,000 worth of voice calls from Miami, FL to Jamaica. :

You're not the only one this has happened to. There are some threads on sprintusers.com as well as howardforums discussing the same issue. It appears the sprint database may have been compromised and people are cloning phones. It's been going on for awhile and Sprint is well aware of it.

[Yankees368]

Yep, I actually started the main thread on hofo. One of my lines was compromised and was seeing the same charges as you. Call the Sprint Fraud dept., and they should be able to to care of it pretty quickly.

http://howardforums.com/showthread.p...highlight=cuba

[Quint101]

Wow. I didn't know that this could happen. My best friend had the same problem as well. She thought that it originated from a phone that was ordered but not received. She was billed last month $281 in overages, $75 in data fees, several 411 calls, and those dingy $10/month SMS services. She called CS and they essentially told her to pound sand... even when the billing showed that she was talking AND using data on the affected phone AT THE SAME TIME. The cloner must have been in metro Atlanta since all calls originated in ATL and most of the calls were to Atlanta area phones.

So she did pound sand... over to Verizon. Sprint has since credited her account but my friend is not coming back.

How is it the system cannot recognize one phone number being active on multiple devices

[diver236]

The thing that bothers me is that it's been going on for at least two years, and Sprint apparently hasn't been able to stop it.

Here's a news story that's from two years ago.

Hit by ID theft, then plagued by Sprint - The Red Tape Chronicles - msnbc.com