What is Mobile Cloning

There has been a lot of buzz around about Mobile Cloning. But what is mobile cloning after all? Mobile Cloning is copying the identity of one mobile telephone to another. In simple words, while the illegal user 'uses' the cellphone, the original cellphone user pays for it. Mobile Cloning is an easy crime to commit due to the easy availability of the cloning software. A search on the Internet also reveals websites openly selling cloning and SIM-card backup softwares readily available at a price of US $35. Run a search on Google and after some tries, you will surely find some software which will let you clone mobiles! Yes there are many softwares and chips available on the Internet which allows you to clone a SIM card into another SIM card. Eventually there are also many other websites which sell chips which can be programmed into SIM card using their software! I personally visited such a site and found it out! One site was even selling a chip with software that enables you to clone almost 5 SIM cards into one and with it they had a detailed manual and softwares too! So after reading all the above text one can easily understand that there are pretty fair amount of resources being sold on the Internet which allow you to clone a mobile. So let us get deeper and let us understand how it is done, and of course the countermeasures also.

Each cellphone has an erasable-programmable read-only memory (EPROM). You can call it as the nucleus of the phone. This chip contains the cellphone's electronic serial number (ESN) and electronic machine identification number (EMIN). The EMIN is comparable to the DNA that makes an individual unique. There are even more numbers related to SIM and mobiles which collectively make a mobile equipment unique to the world (and of course to the cellphone operators). The problem with this model of mobility is that even the cellphone's operators can't distinguish a cloned phone from a genuine one.

This crime is said to be pretty easy to commit and one can easily clone a mobile. At the first glance, a newbie can think that this must be a matter involving all sort of programming and hardware information on the Mobile's architecture but they are wrong. Cloning doesn't require one to be a hardware engineer of a mobile nor does he need to be a programmer. All of the cloning can be done via the softwares available for this purpose. Many such softwares are designed in a way that anyone just needs to connect two phones simultaneously to a computer or one by one and the rest will be done by the software itself. However one of the famous softwares (name will not be disclosed) gave the user all the important information about the mobile which was connected to the computer. There are a lot of softwares available for download which can do the same. Now think of the risk if your mobile gets into the hands of any person who has a computer and knows the important numbers required cloning a mobile! Any such person can download software for the purpose or better buy a chip which can be programmed as a SIM and later be used to inflate your bills.

However some people will claim that most of the numbers which make a phone identified over a network is generated in combination with unique identities of SIM as well as phone, so the cloned mobiles can be caught or will not work. I ask them a humble question: say you changed the handset and used the same SIM in the new handset; will your phone work in this case? Yes, it will. So will it work in case of cloned mobiles? The numbers which are generated in combination with the identities of both the SIM and the phone are generated for temporary use or we can say that they are significant for only a "talk session". So it should be very well understood that every phone is at risk!

Unscrupulous cellphone dealers and repairers who have access to the ESN and EMIN of someone's cellphone may offer them to the people who can clone mobiles. Sometimes the information is obtained from service providers. Using special software, the cloner embeds these numbers on the EPROM of another cellphone, from which a user can make calls for which someone else pays.

Each year, the mobile phone industry loses millions globally in revenue because of the criminal actions of persons who are able to reconfigure mobile phones so that their calls are billed to other phones. Cloned mobiles are specially used in drug crimes. Drug dealers need to be in constant contact with their sources of supply and their confederates on the streets. Traffickers acquire cloned phones at a minimum cost, make dozens of calls, and then throw the phone away later. The Mobile companies say that they are doing their best to stop Mobile cloning. They promise to introduce newer security features in the mobile phones and SIM cards. But it seems as if they are going to fail. The reason is: no matter how much protection they apply onto SIM cards, there will always be a way to extract the SIM card information which then can be used to clone it into another SIM card.

What is Mobile Cloning

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