"In the 21st century, even such jokes are a reality!" SMS SCAM!

[Объединенное Детективное Бюро]

This year, the Internet was flooded with advertisements, offering for little money to determine the location of subscribers of cellular networks by mobile phone number. The seeds of SMS scammers fell on fertile soil. Internet crooks decided to "warm their hands" in one of the most promising areas of recent times - the use of positioning systems in mobile commerce. Such systems do exist, but so far only scammers make money on respectable mobile communication clients. "In the 21st century, even such jokes are a reality!" Sites providing "cell phone tracking services" have worked before. One of the sites, Themobiletracker.com, is "a system based on triangulation of a repeater that tracks cell phones using GSM and GPS technology." Working with this service, you can calculate the necessary mobile for free. Drive the mobile number into the cell and on the satellite map determine the location of the owner of the cell. That is, you first see the place of the mobile on the map, as if from a satellite, then a man with a woman in the bath appears on the monitor screen, and then a message follows that this is "just a joke." Such cool sites work to the present day, but not all such sites are so harmless. Here is an example, on the resource Gsm-locator.ru, which flaunts with the slogan "In the 21st century, and such jokes are real!", To determine the location of a mobile, you need to get a special code, and for this you need to send an SMS to 5537. The declared cost of this service - 8 rubles., But in fact they remove from 170 to 186 rubles. (Depends on the mobile operator). The code actually comes, but after entering it, the same picture pops up with a man and a woman in the bath, as on Themobiletracker.com. Suckers are bred in the same way on the Gsmpeleng.ru resource (the Gsm-poisk.ru resource provides the same service) - however, no one admits that this is a joke, although the location of the desired mobile phone in Moscow is always found in the metro area “ Okhotny Ryad". In the city of St. Petersburg, in the metro area "Prospect Veterans". The cost of SMS “10 rubles per day” announced on the main page, however, as it turned out, from 177 to 305 rubles are actually removed from the account. "It is basically impossible to determine the location of a subscriber by his phone number, except when mobile operators themselves offer such a service," said Eldar Murtazin, a leading analyst at Mobile Research Group. "This is all one of the varieties of a regular SMS scam." A spy pornographer But if you can’t find out the location of a cell phone only by number, in principle, it’s quite possible to find out the coordinates when loading special software onto a monitored mobile phone, even if the mobile does not have a GPS satellite navigation system. The coordinates of the mobile phone are being clarified regarding the location of the base stations of telecom operators. This is exactly the kind of service that users are offered by the site Mobile-spy.ru (its counterpart is Mobspy.ru), created by a certain company MobPartners, the coordinates of this organization are absent both on the resource itself and on the Internet in general. On the Internet resource they suggest downloading a program that, as promised, "after determining the coordinates, it will be sent to our server via the GPRS channel, and you can see it on the map." This service, as you know, is not without charge, to activate your account you need to send an SMS to 3649 short number (the cost of the service is from 177 to 304 rubles, depending on the telecom operator). Also, in order for the service to start working, you need to send an identification phone number, IMEI through the form on the website. We sent SMS to a short number, paying 300 rubles. (price for the Beeline operator), we received an SMS message that if you pay for the service a second time, we can determine not only the location, but also receive information about calls and SMS correspondence of the number to which the application is installed. Well, find out like that! We decided to spend another 300 rubles, registered and tried to install the MobileSpy program. To get started on a Nokia E71 phone running the Symbian operating system. We were asked to crack Symbian with a special program that also needed to be downloaded on the same site, otherwise, as it turned out, the MobileSpy program is simply impossible to install. However, the "hacking" failed, respectively, and the MobileSpy program could not be installed on the first attempt. Then we decided to try installing the program on an HP iPaq phone running under the Windows Mobile operating system, which, unlike Symbian, there is no need to break to install a spyware program. After starting the program, she immediately registered herself in autorun, but did not transmit any coordinates to the server. The Internet resource determined that the phone is generally located somewhere in the ocean, and its coordinates, respectively, are 0 and 0 (zero and zero). We also failed to find any real opportunities for tracking correspondence and, accordingly, telephone conversations, that is, it turned out that the second SMS for 300 rubles was generally unnecessary. We turned to a familiar hacker with a request to work on the program, and he found out that the MobileSpy application has some kind of Capability Network Control program, which is used for low-level access to some features of a cell phone. For example, when accessing the Internet Bank via a cell phone, there is a theoretical possibility to intercept traffic from a mobile phone. However, we were not able to figure out what exactly MobileSpy does. We fully admit that secretly for the phone user sends SMS to some regular paid service; Windows Mobile allows you to do this. We decided to try to contact the developers, calling ourselves customers. In the response that came from the email address teemnaloga@gmail.com , we were asked to carefully read the instructions on the site. We scored this email address in the most popular search engines, and it turned out that this mailbox appears in the registration data on a domain with the intriguing name uznay-datu-smerti.ru, which redirected us to a porn site. The spy was also part-time and a pornographer. In the wake of the fashion trend. The explanation of why all these SMS rogues have become active right now, we think, is hiding in the fact that the possibility of using mobile phone positioning systems has become widespread recently. At the end of 2008, Nokia launched its new Nokia Friend View service, and at the beginning of 2009 Google introduced the Latitude system (the official Russian name is “Google Latitude”), which allows not only to determine their location, but also to monitor the coordinates of other users of these systems . Half a year ago, the mobile social network Wi2Geo.ru entered into the active phase of operation, created by domestic developers and allowing it to be positioned not only at base stations, but also over Wi-Fi. Wi2Geo.ru allows you to monitor the location of your friends who have installed a special program on their cell phone or computer, and also communicate with them. “I think that scammers simply took advantage of the fashion trend,” says Sergey Kurlovich, the founder of Wi2Geo company. “Everyone’s mobile positioning is heard, and on this wave numerous projects started offering to spy on the person you are interested in.” For users, all these programs are absolutely free, but in this case, unlike the usual scam, it smells really good money. “The capabilities of systems created on such platforms are limited only by imagination,” says Sergey Kurlovich. “This is, for example, geo-targeted advertising. You ask for the location of a pharmacy, bookstore or restaurant that are nearby, and in return you receive offers about discounts, sales, new proposals and on the basis of this you decide. Or, for example, monitoring systems for shopping carts in large supermarkets. You put a special chip on such a cart, and soon the merchandisers get the exact information rmatsiya on buying behavior: where and how much time the buyer stopped at what looked than interested. " When the developers of these systems start making money on them - it’s foggy, but for now, scammers make money on these positioning services. According to the materials of the magazine "Money" No. 16-17 (721-722) dated 04/27/2009

 

[Матушкин Андрей Николаевич]

The crooks are missing on the Internet.

 

[Lady-detectiv]

Well, everyone seems to know that this is a scam, but sites are working and multiplying and people who come across this are not being translated.