Showing posts with label Thief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Thief. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

New Type of Stealing - Mobile Credit

Recently in Egypt, some new ways to steal people have emerged. Thieves steal mobile phones credit !!!!
Well I have seen 2 ways of doing that. If you are familiar with GSM providers in Egypt, most if not all of them provide a service called Credit Transfer, allowing a user to transfer a part of his credit to another user.

1. The thief sends a message to a random number, the message is an identical copy of the message received from the service provider upon the reception of a credit transfer.
2. The thief then sends a second message to the same number saying, "sorry, i did a credit transfer to you by mistake, could you please transfer the credit back to me?" or something similar. The naiive user will transfer the credit, that he never received in the first place, back to the thief.

Another way used in stealing mobile phones credit that I have seen many times.
1. The thief manages to get the username and password of an MSN user.
2. The thief talks to random people, preferably an opposing sex to the stolen account's owner, telling them that he/she needs mobile credit really bad, and his/her father is preventing him from leaving the house to buy credit, so can you buy credit for me and just give me the number of the card... or a similar message.
3. The naiive user again buys the credit and sends the credit recharge code to the theif, which recharges his phone immediately to cut any way of going back for the user.

Those thieves probably sell the credit they accumulate either to mobile phone shops (which sell this credit through Credit Transfer to other users that needs small amounts of credit) or to the people on the street that sell the calls to people who don't own a mobile phone on the street.