CELL PHONE CLONING A GROWTH INDUSTRY FOR HIGH-TECH PREDATORS.

Byline: Mimi Whitefield Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

They're stealthy, ubiquitous and don't care whom they victimize.

Electronic bandits have snatched cellular phone numbers from the airwaves and cloned phones used by the Miami office of the Secret Service. When Red Cross workers heading to the ValuJet crash in the Everglades pulled cell phones off the shelf, they found that the telephones had been cloned and deactivated.

In Los Angeles, police say their cloned-phone caseload is large and growing.

``A part-time job for a lot of dope dealers is cloning cell phones,'' said Detective Vic Pietrantoni, who works in the Los Angeles Police Department's robbery and homicide division.

``Even I had my phone cloned. I had a $300 phone bill and calls to Alaska.''

Cellular phone fraud is big business. Industrywide, losses totaled about $650 million last year. It costs consumers, too, because rates go up to cover the losses.

``If left unchecked, the illegal industry will make it inefficient to stay in the cellular telecom industry,'' said Cmdr. Robert Parker, who heads a Miami Metro-Dade police investigative unit for telecom fraud.

Rapid changes in the telecommunications industry - with the doors open to competition and new players coming into the market - also increase the chances of fraud.

For technically adept thieves, the process of cloning a cellular phone is simple:

First, they steal the phone number, most often by using an electronic scanner to read a phone's serial number and phone number.

Then they program the stolen numbers into at least one, if not several, stolen cellular phones.

After that, the reprogrammed equipment is resold.

Cellular fraudsters use state-of-the-art devices that can easily fit inside a briefcase; they communicate and buy illegal equipment through the Internet; and increasingly, they're using stolen cellular numbers to mask drug and weapons dealing, money laundering and other crimes.

The good news is that law enforcement agencies and cellular companies themselves are fighting back with a new arsenal of tools, technology and laws that make it easier to detect and prosecute cellular bandits.

But even if your cellular company tries to play it safe and is vigilant against fraud, nowadays a call could get handed off to three or four different companies along the way.

``You don't know how secure their networks are. What if someone gets into their network and then gets into yours?'' asked Debbie Elsinger, Bellcore's executive director for security and fraud solutions.

A Miami man arrested last year had a list containing 22,000 stolen numbers. Azzon Johnson pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $1 million in restitution.

But that pales in comparison to a case in New York this summer. At the time of their arrests, Abraham Romy and Irina Bashkavich allegedly had amassed 80,000 stolen cellular numbers - many from cars heading to New York airports.

When 20,000 executives descended on Dallas earlier this year for the Cellular Telephone Industry Association's Wireless '96 exposition and turned on their phones, the cellular bandits were waiting. For them, it was a virtual Fort Knox.

So AT&T Wireless decided to strike back, bringing in its own team of fraud fighters. They looked for cell phones with aberrant calling patterns, went out with tracking equipment and turned the information they gleaned over to local police.

During Operation Clone Star State, police arrested members of a group believed responsible for about one-third of the cloning in the Dallas area, said Roseanna DeMaria, AT&T Wireless corporate vice president/revenue security.

In an effort to get a jump on telecom criminals, law enforcement officials monitor the Internet and study publications like Hackers Quarterly.

``The Internet can give us useful clues about the technology out there and has become a tool in finding out the bad guys,'' said Russ Waughman, an AT&T Wireless engineer. ``Hackers just love to talk on the Net.''