Tracfone Fraud

Yesterday I was walking through a Lowe's hardware store. I saw a Tracfone for sale. Tracfone is a product consisting of a phone and separate prepaid wireless minutes. Given you can buy these with cash in your local Circuit City, I sensed an opportunity for troublemakers who prefer to act anonymously. (While there are other prepaid cellular plans, it appears they tie to existing accounts, or at least don't offer the easy cash purchase method of Tracfone.) I found that Tracfone sells at least one cell phone, the Motorola v120t, which can be equipped with the Multi-Connect Serial Data Kit - 98320 -- a cellular modem. At this point a dial-up ISP is required to use the cellular modem. I'm not sure where to go with this, but overall this exercise has given me an idea how criminals might seek to hide their identity.


On a related note, it's possible Tracfone's prepaid calling cards have been the target of fraud. This post claims people are selling Tracfone cards on eBay, and references this thread as "proof". I also found a site which teaches ways to defraud Tracfone, complaining that Tracfone defrauds its customers.


Let me make it clear that none of this discussion is intended to assist the reader with defrauding anyone. I try to understand these techniques because my professional career involves helping companies to combat fraud.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
3:18 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technical or pol
Read more