Hackers steal Br44M from a mobile phone

Recently, a mobile phone user received an unpleasant surprise, when his phone bill soared up to Br44 million.

With this money, you could talk without interruption with any European country for 17 days, or 9.5 days with the most remote country apart from Europe and the CIS.

The European Radio of Belarus decided to research how an ordinary Belarusian mobile phone user could talk for such a lengthy period of time.

It turned out that it was not him talking. Rather, the fraud is directly linked with the currently fashionable service of having several operators on a single SIM-card, according to Ruslan Pobal, a spokesman for the Belarus’s Military Counterintelligence.

“In order to obtain this card, it is necessary to scan the SIM-cards of operators. It means they can be scanned, and the secret information is loaded to a silver card.

In this situation, the following happened to the man. The software that scanned his card was having a virus. This virus is activated when a user travels abroad and connects to the international roaming service.

Correspondingly, the number of this man who went to Ukraine was used through Blue Tooth by other people, most likely the programmers who developed the scanning software,” he told the European Radio for Belarus.

We tried to research about this service that helps phone users lose their money. We found out that there is enough information in the Internet about how to make this multi-silver card without leaving home.

Scanning does not require a lot of time. You need to buy a burner, which together with a CD and special templates for new cards is available for not more than $80.

This programmer is used to scan SIM cards and retrieve two secret codes – Ki and IMSI, which are unique for every user. The information obtained is later saved to blank templates, and you get a single card with several operators.

However, if you don’t do it yourself, the risk exists despite the viruses, according to Anton Cybulski, an expert with one of the largest mobile communication operator in Belarus.

“When a man that made a clone of your SIM cards has a hidden agenda, he can save the image of this card for his own use.

Later, he can use it, but only when the card’s owner is currently not registered in the network, i.e. his phone is switched off or he is roaming in the network of another operator.

In this case, it is possible to make calls at the cost of the original user. SIM-card can be scanned manually. It means that the secret codes cannot be intercepted through radio channels,” Cybulski explained.

By the way, the card-cloning service is widely available. On the one hand, it is not banned. On the other hand, it is not permitted, either. They can make a silver card for $10-20.

After all, it is up to you to decide either to have three operators on one phone or to have three phones for each of them. The first option is definitely more convenient, but sometimes you have to pay a lot for it.