Ever since cell phone carriers created a
national registry of stolen phones on Nov. 1, it’s become much harder, if not
impossible, to reactivate one in the U.S. That’s the good news. Here’s the bad:
The database isn’t likely to rob thieves of the desire to steal your phone.
All major U.S. cell phone companies, including
Verizon (VZ), AT&T (T), T-Mobile, and Sprint (S), are now sharing the
serial numbers of stolen phones through the registry. Like VIN numbers on cars,
these unique IDs are branded onto the hardware of the device and are hard to
tamper with. If a thief tries to pop out a SIM card and use a phone purchased
from one U.S. company to sign up for service with another, the serial number
will automatically show up as belonging to a stolen phone.
Courtesy ecoATM
But wireless providers in other countries
aren’t part of the registry. And savvy iPhone thieves have realized that the
way to get around it is by selling smartphones overseas, according to
Washington, D.C., Police Chief Cathy Lanier.
Secondhand dealers buy used phones for cash,
then pool and sell them to middlemen who resell them to retailers in Africa or
China, says Lanier, who led the effort to establish the U.S. registry. A stolen
phone can go for $400 abroad, she says. “That completely voids the blacklist we
worked a year and half to put in place,” Lanier told me. “The new entrepreneurs
… have created new challenges for us.”
Lanier has recently begun to point fingers at
companies she says are facilitating the black market. One is the large
video-game retailer, Gamestop, in Grapevine, Tex., which buys used smartphones.
“We’ve found stolen phones in their possession,” Lanier said on Feb. 19 on a
D.C. local news program, NewsTalk with Bruce DePuyt. Lanier said on the show
that Gamestop has started to provide Washington police with serial numbers of
the used phones it buys and is considering ending the practice of paying cash
for phones. “We are working with police,” Gamestop spokeswoman Wendy Dominguez
writes in an e-mail.
The Federal Communications Commission is in
the early stages of an effort to crack down on the black market overseas. The
agency recently signed a data-sharing agreement with Mexico; wireless companies
in Mexico and the U.S. are now sharing serial numbers of stolen phones. The FCC
is looking to sign more agreements with other countries, says FCC spokesman
Neil Grace. Hopefully that will happen soon. It might be the only way to stop
some guy on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, from listening to your playlists,
checking out your vacation pictures, or worse–stealing your identity.
Dwoskin is a staff writer for Bloomberg
Businessweek in Washington.
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