There is an easy way to combat the burgeoning business of cellphone theft, write Belinda Beresford and David Shapshak
Cellphones are particularly enticing to the brotherhood of thieves, whether acquired in muggings, hijackings or straightforward burglaries.
Cancelling the SIM card will stop anyone else running up your telephone account with calls to friends and acquaintances around the country – or the globe. But your cellphone still has a value; slip in another SIM (system identification module)card, and the phone will work perfectly and can be resold.
Many bereaved cellphone owners are unaware that they can make the thief’s efforts in vain by disabling their stolen phone and turning it into a complicated piece of junk.
Almost every cellphone contains a 15- digit identification code, etched into its silicon chips. This number allows the networks and service providers to “blacklist” any phone, making it unusable. Putting in another SIM card won’t work because the phone itself has been disabled.
The insurance industry estimates that 2 000 cellphones are stolen a month, adding up to approximately R30-million a year, with each handset retailing at R2 000 to R3 000. One small insurance broker says their firm processes R15 000 to R20 000 a month in cellphone theft claims.
If blacklisting were used on a wide scale, it would remove the motive for stealing cellphones, so why don’t cellphone companies disable stolen phones as a matter of course?
The cellphone industry has consistently defended its weak-wristed responses to ongoing cellphone thefts with justifications along the lines of: “There’s nothing we can do about it”. But they could simply disable the phone.
Unlike blocking a SIM card, before blacklisting a phone the industry requires owners to get a case number from the police as proof that the phone has been reported stolen.
Joan Joffe, Vodacom’s group executive for corporate affairs, says the procedure is necessary to prevent malicious tampering. She cites instances of jealous husbands blacklisting wives’ phones, or people trying to get a new cellphone by claiming theirs was stolen. Such nefarious behaviour extends into the corporate world – Teljoy says it has encountered situations where companies try to cancel the phones of rivals.
The companies also say that un- blacklisting a phone is more time- consuming, costly and expensive than unblocking a SIM card, and so more proof of the theft or loss is required.
Public inertia bears part of the blame, says the cellphone industry. Often once people have cancelled the SIM card and collected their insurance, they wash their hands of the matter.
That might be because users don’t know about the facility. A strawpoll of cellphone theft victims found that none had been told they could blacklist their phones when they contacted their service providers to cancel the SIM card. However, some service providers do claim to automatically tell anyone reporting a lost phone. For legal reasons, service providers, not the networks, have to do the blacklisting.
But if the insurance industry required that stolen phones be blacklisted before paying out, cellphone theft would soon grind to a halt.
“It’s matter of getting critical mass. As soon as the unethical public realise they can’t steal a phone, then things will change,” Joffe said. However, to date neither network has done any advertising to heighten customer awareness, although both say this will change.
There appears to be some confusion in the industry about how swiftly blacklisting can take effect. According to Vodac, it can take 48 hours for a phone to be blacklisted on the MTN, Vodacom and international networks; to unblacklist can take up to four or five days. But Teljoy says blacklisting can be almost instantaneous, although revoking it will take longer.
Cellphones can also be “greylisted”, where they monitor which calls are being made and where, but still allow the phone to be used. This was used to track stolen phones, but the popularity of pay-as-you-go cellphone packages, which give the user anonymity, has led the service providers to stop this service, MTN says.
Stolen cellphones make money for the thieves; the cellphone industry sells another phone to replace the lost one and the service providers get another customer. But you, the original owner, lose out. Even if you have insurance, you’ll probably have to pay an excess – not to mention any physical effects you may have suffered in the mugging or theft.
So if your cellphone is stolen, have it blacklisted, and do your own bit to fight crime.