PART XVI. "THE ROAMING SCAM" Some people who are playing with phones that have been originally registered but have been turned off for non-payment of bills have used the "Roaming Scam" to place free calls. NOTE: The cellular carriers will still have records of these calls, and will prosecute those they eventually catch up to (yeah,right). However, industry standards have shown that they pursue less than one percent of the fraudulent calls placed. It is far more economical for them to build software and hardware traps to prevent unbilled calls from being placed rather than attempt to collect on the other end which involves greater amounts of personnel and manpower with smaller actual collections. People have performed the roaming scam by taking their phones into areas where the SIDH numbers are different from the ones currently programmed into their phones. Refer to the SIDH listing in this file for the codes for particular cities. By reprogramming the NAM and inserting a fake SIDH, the cellular carrier will often accept the phone call, but on occassion the user will get a message that the phone must have a local code in order to access the system. As cellular carriers grow larger in size, this message is less frequently heard. At this point, the cellular carrier instructs the user to contact them. I don't think so. The cellular service has the best chance of of catching a spoofer who either calls a friend continually at home or by developing traceable trends such as calling the same number from within the same cell at the same time every day. Or doing something stupid like ordering a Pizza. "But I want to hook up the phone to an acoustic coupler, d00d, and call all the k-rad out-state-boards for the latest PyRut WaR3z!4@$$!$@!@" <-lamer. Well, one of the properties of cellular phone systems is that the transmitter freqs. may be changed or "hopped" in the constant effort to allocate freqs. Because of freq. hopping it is very difficult to triangulate a cellular phone using standard directional finding methods (trace you, d00d). Further, it is known that a directional antenna randomly aimed at cellsite repeaters will confuse directional finding equipment being used by them that is synced to their freq. hopping scheme. *****************************************************************************