A package-induced investigation

If your phone is not a regular channel, do you suspect it could be stolen goods? It may even have been bought by homeless Street Tramps.

The following case will bring you to an epiphany.

A package-induced investigation

At the end of May 2012, a FedEx delivery station in Rancho, Calif., sorted out a damaged parcel, with dozens of packaged iphones strewn on the ground in the distribution station. A FedEx employee immediately contacted Apple. With the help of Verizon Security, Apple quickly confirmed Federal express suspicions that the phones were smuggled and could be sold on the black market.

Two hours later, a man named Brian Fisitna (Brian Fichtner) appeared at the delivery station. Fisitna, although very thin, but also very strong, demeanor revealed the taste of professional police. He was even sort of similar to actor George Clooney. He spent his entire career in law enforcement, first as a narcotics investigator, he recently joined the ecrime unit of the California Ministry of Justice, a division specializing in the prosecution of technology-related crimes, including identity theft, retaliatory pornography, and large-scale electronic product smuggling.

Fisitna cut off the broken parcel with a knife. There are 37 iphones in it. He wrote down the serial number of each cell phone and then sealed the package again. Then he went back silently and waited. The next day, a Sacramento resident named Wahif Shamshad (Waif Shamshade) took the parcel away. Investigators from the anti-electronic crime team followed him all the way west to an apartment in the suburbs. There, the parcel changed hands again, this time to a more than 30-year-old, skinny Win Sholin (Shoulin Wen, transliteration) and his wife Tan Yuting (yuting Tan, transliteration).

Secret Investigations show that Win Sholin grew up in mainland China and immigrated to the United States as an adult. He opened a mobile phone and electronics store in the Sacramento Center, where he had no criminal record. However, the rich experience in handling the case to cultivate a Firtner sensitive professional sense of smell, he decided that there is a mystery behind it.

Win Sholin and Tan Yuling's house is located in a wooded community in Rochester, a two-story building. Investigators were spying on them in the August sun. Kungfu, they finally found the couple dragged 4 heavy parcels to a delivery station.

They want to mail these parcels to an apartment in Hong Kong. The investigators of the anti-electronic crime team saw Win Sholin and Tan Yuling pay for the courier service. When the couple returned to the black Nissan's SUV and drove away, law enforcement officers searched the parcel with immigration and customs agents: there were 190 new smartphones with no unpacking--mostly iphones, and some blackberries. According to the serial number, many of the iphones inside are the ones that were taken from the Shamshad.

Fisitna's suspicions have been confirmed. Now he just needs to piece together all the links in the chain. In the next few months, members of the anti-electronic crime squad came to North Carolina State and Boston, where the smartphone was purchased and the Shoupengchong, the electronic commodity broker, Pengchong Shou. Investigators applied for a search warrant, then downloaded bank transactions and looked for discarded file information. They also had several hours of telephone communication with representatives of Sprint, At&t and Verizon Wireless.

Thus, a so-called "credit mule arbitrage" gang gradually surfaced. The pattern is ingenious, but the process is surprisingly simple, and the breadth of its tentacles is staggering. Middlemen, such as Shamshad, are randomly assigned to major cities in the United States, where they run to homeless camps or transitional homes and hire people at 100 of dollars to buy contract machines at local electronics stores.

Back in California, they handed over the phones to Windan, who were responsible for sending their phones to Asian contacts. The business has a huge profit margin: in North America, mobile operators typically subsidize smartphones to attract people to sign up to years of voice and data packages. In other words, the price required to buy such a mobile phone is much lower than the normal bare metal market. Windan took advantage of the model by buying a mobile phone with a middleman and a "mule" at a cost of $200 and then reselling it to China at a price of nearly 1000 dollars.

According to records from the anti-electronic crime team, Win Sholin sent 111 packages a year through his FedEx account. When the criminal gang was completely knocked out in March 2013, he and his wife had become very rich, earning close to 2.5 million dollars a yearly income.

Win Sholin is now sentenced to three years ' imprisonment for conspiracy to acquire and resell stolen property. Tan Yuting was also sentenced to one year in prison. They are serving their sentences in a prison in California. Shamshad, as a middleman, was also convicted of obtaining stolen property.

However, Fisitna and his colleagues say that the underlying serious problem is not to be solved by Wen Tan criminal gangs. "As long as there is profit, thieves will continue to steal the phone." Robert Modest, head of the anti-electronic crime team, recently told me. Morgester "I mean, Willie Sutton, why did Willie Sutton Rob Banks?" he laughed. The answer is simple: there is money in the bank. ”

Mobile phone theft is rampant

In the 2009, about 5% of the world's people had mobile phones. Although 2015 has not yet arrived, this figure is expected to break through 35%. In other words, there will be 2.5 billion mobile subscribers globally, equivalent to the combined population of China and India. Given the rapid advances in technological innovation and the falling prices of processors and chipsets, it is not hard to imagine that more than half of the world's population will one day be captured by a small screen of smartphones-as soon as possible in 2017.

For many people, these devices are our most valuable asset. At the very least, mobile phones have become one of the most valuable possessions we carry on a daily basis. When we walk the streets, we use our mobile phones to listen to music, when we take the subway, we use our mobile phones for entertainment, and when we eat out, we put our phones on the table--it's like a hand-held computer with a huge energy, but it doesn't feel any burden if it's comparable to a laptop.

This gadget puts our entire life into its fuselage, from family photos to work emails to various bank accounts. In just one hours, however, these devices will be stolen and sold at a price of hundreds of dollars, without the help of a pawn shop or a professional. According to the weight, it is equal to 13 times times the price of silver. That is why street-phone thefts have been rampant in recent years. According to the consumer report, 3.1 million Americans were robbed of mobile phones in 2013, well above 1.6 million in 2012.

Lockout, a mobile security firm, says 1 of every 10 smartphone users in the United States have been robbed of their phones. 68% of the victims never recovered their equipment. In America, about one-third of all thefts are related to smartphones.

For years, the mobile-security industry has refused to take even the simplest steps to prevent street-phone theft. They do not have much incentive to deploy this measure: operators can earn a lot of money by selling theft to consumers, and these operators may lose much of their revenue if security software is able to prevent the theft of mobile phones from happening on a large scale. William Duckworth, professor of Business School at the University of Dakovos, reckons that Americans spend as much as $4.8 billion a year on high-end mobile-phone coverage, with a cost of 580 million dollars a year for equipment replacements. ）

However, the seriousness of the problem has not been overlooked, even operators are powerless to stop the pace of reform. In August last year, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, signed a decree from George Gascon, the San Francisco district attorney, and New York State, Eric Schneider Biederman, the Attorney-General of Gascons. Forcing the state to sell mobile phones adds a "destroy switch" feature that allows users to lock their phones remotely when they are stolen, making them unusable. A similar decree has been passed in Minnesota.

In 2013, Apple deduced a feature called "activating locks" to help users protect themselves from the use of password protection to prevent criminals from washing white stolen phones. In iOS 7, users need to set up to start the Activate lock. In iOS 8, this feature is turned on by default. Google (Weibo) and Microsoft have also pledged to include similar software in their new handsets.

Max Szabo, a spokesman for the San Francisco district attorney's office, said the emergence of Apple-activated locks had had a decisive impact. In San Francisco, 2014 years ago, 5 months of iphone theft was reduced by 38%. In New York, the theft of Apple products has also been reduced by 19%. "It is clear that the ' destruction switch ' does have a deterrent effect," he said. Saab said.

Villains, Outsmart

The good news, however, may include a few more qualifiers: the "destruction switch" can only work in certain circumstances and deter the most common thefts. If you are an ordinary street thief who is driven by opportunism, it may be a little more likely to steal an iphone with an "activation lock" from a passer-by's pocket.

But activating the lock is just a piece of software. Any programmer will tell you the truth: anything written with code will eventually be cracked. At the end of May 2014, for example, two anonymous hackers unveiled a icloud hacking program called Doulci, which allows users to reset their phones to factory status-just like new handsets they've just bought. As long as there is a certain technical basis, you can find similar tutorials from the Internet, and hands-on implementation.

While Apple and Gascons may not want to admit it, locked phones are not necessarily worthless. Dustin Jones, founder of Harvest Cellular, a telecoms recycling company, recently surveyed 200 second-hand iphones sold on ebay. Of the 200 devices, 32 have clearly posted the "Activate lock" locked interface. Although Apple has done its best, Jones found in Harvest Cellular's official blog: "Thieves still have some very simple fence channels." ”

In fact, the "activate lock" works only when an iOS device is tied to a user's iOS account and the user suspects that his or her phone is stolen. Because of this, the "destruction switch" cannot stop criminals like Win Sholin and Tan Yuting. In this case, there is no one to trigger this feature, and the mobile phone is quickly shipped overseas, it is possible to install a new SIM card immediately. Nicholas Pacilio, a former spokesman for the California Justice Department, said the "Credit mule arbitrage" activity, similar to that of the Wen Tan gang, was increasing in size and frequency.

Burglaries are also on the rise. In such criminal activities, criminals break into warehouses or electronic stores to rob large numbers of devices that have not been activated. In 2014, Florida State, the Attorney-General, announced the arrest of a gang that used stolen cars to break into the shops of Best Buy, hhgregg and CompUSA to rob Electronic products in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. They robbed about 2 million dollars of Apple equipment before the gang was knocked out by police. Security analysts have found that many street gangs in Oakland, California, have sold stolen goods from drugs into the iphone.

In fact, Ben Levitan, a telecoms veteran of Verizon and Sprint, once said that the "Levitan" did not fully address the theft of smartphones and could even lead to an unpredictable new direction.

"You rolled out the destruction switch." "Very good," said Levitan. Petty theft on the streets may be reduced, and there may be a significant reduction. But the internal parts of these phones are still valuable, right? People can just take the phone apart and sell the parts inside. "He expects this to be a" new black market ".

There is evidence that such a market has emerged. In Alameda County, the anti-electronic crime squad recently smashed an illegal smartphone parts scalping gang, operating through a storefront called Applenberry. (Applenberry's owner, Sammy Chan) and Steven Chan have admitted to acquiring stolen property and selling counterfeit goods. This August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced the arrest of 20 suspects associated with the so-called "Mustafa clan". The "Mustafa clan" is a criminal gang located in Minnesota State, which specializes in providing stolen smartphones or parts to black-market traders in the Middle East and Asia.

"Even if there is a ' activate lock ', there will still be ' credit mule arbitrage ' and there will still be burglary. "Gupte Samir Gupte, lookout product manager, said. In his view, manufacturers may end up providing a unique product key when producing electronic products. The user may have to use the appropriate product key when activating the phone. But they are not going to take these extra steps unless they are under enough pressure. In addition, Gupte admits: "As long as the emergence of new technologies, thieves can often find a way to crack." ”

Criminals are smart and know how to keep up with the times. Pennsylvania's Law enforcement department, for example, arrested two smartphone thieves this September, accusing it of breaking into more than one electronic store. According to police, they will use a camera-equipped drone to detect the theft target.

"There is no way to completely prevent smart-phone thieves, there is never an effective way." Jeff Kagan, a wireless industry analyst, said, "It's a bit like a cat-and-mouse war between a computer virus developer and a security software designer, or a long confrontation between a gun maker and an electronic dog developer." The so-called ' villains, outsmart. ’”

The introduction of a complete solution

At the same time, activists worry that the "destruction switch" technology will infringe on the rights of smartphone users. The US Electronic Frontier Foundation issued an open letter last year to criticize the legislation for "misuse" of the technology before the California launch of the "Destruction switch" act. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that, theoretically, the Government is perfectly capable of forcing operators to shut down certain handsets-a nightmare for civil liberties.

Equally frightening is that the "destruction switch" does not mean that the user's privacy will not be disclosed. The attack on Sony's PlayStation Network several years ago showed that despite Sony's ability to shut down the system, hackers still stole 77 million of users ' account information.

Looking at smart-phone thefts from this perspective, coupled with a succession of negative factors, can be frustrating. In the future, once our mobile phones are stolen by "ingenuity" thieves, we may only choose to accept them silently.

But when I raised the question to security analyst Mark Rogers (Marc Rogers), he objected. The problem with the theft of smartphones, he argues, appears to be unresolved because we mistakenly believe that this is a whole problem that can be solved simply by killer apps. In fact, the problem is complex and involves a multi-level dilemma that requires a multi-level solution.

Rogers believes that the best way to reduce theft is through a series of complementary technologies. Call it a whole package, which includes more "destruction switches", even if they are cracked; more radical legislation, even if some thieves get away with it, more third-party apps that can help users strengthen their defenses.

Lookout has developed an app that tracks stolen devices, takes photos with front-facing cameras, and marks locations when unauthorized users try to use their hands. Paul Chau, a computer assistant professor at Georgia Tech, is also working on an authentication protocol that remembers the unique way users use touch screens through long-term data accumulation. If used in conjunction with a security system, such software can turn off the phone when an unauthorized user is found using the behavior.

"There should be a containment of criminals in every link," Rogers said. "The chain of interest in smartphone theft should be conceived as an economy, and a package of solutions will be found to shake the economy." The entire supply chain must be subverted. You may not be able to catch all the criminals, but at least you can beat them in some places. ”