Mysterious Fake Cellphone Towers Are Intercepting Calls All Over The US

business insider ^ | Sept. 3, 2014 | Jack Dutton

[wtd]

Seventeen fake cellphone towers were discovered across the U.S. last week, according to a report in Popular Science.

Rather than offering you cellphone service, the [fake] towers appear to be connecting to nearby phones, bypassing their encryption, and either tapping calls or reading texts.

[snip]

Although it is unclear who owns the towers, ESD found that several of them were located near U.S. military bases.

[a fool in paradise]

This article is cribbed from a lot of other tech sites’ articles. But at least they provided links to them embedded in the original article.

[reed13k]

I could be mistaken but doesn’t the FCC only regulater transmissions and not receivers? So if these are only receiving and monitoring then can the FCC do anything? Now if they are sending as well as receiving I get the point.

[KoRn]

"doesn’t the FCC only regulater transmissions and not receivers?"

Apparently so. Another FReeper here who is also a wireless engineer enlightened me about it. I was just listening to Beck, and he had on the CEO of the company that makes the phones in this story, and he said these "fake towers" usually aren't towers at all.

He said that they could simply be a computer with a couple of connected antennas. Someone could have a laptop in a hotel room(for example) that could do this, and potentially 'capture' phones within a half mile radius.

[buckalfa]

Then again, maybe the towers were part of the HAARP conspiracy. My tin foil hat needs blocked and cleaned.

[LonePalm]

You should not take the word 'tower' in the story to mean that there are actual physical towers. They merely act like towers electronically.

Whoever is doing it, it is not NSA. They don't need them. It is more likely state or local police.

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[Jack Hydrazine]

NSA Caught Installing Fake Cell Phone Towers Across America to Intercept Calls!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1OvJ33ebwM

[Focault's Pendulum]

You can bet your ass that if you or I were to set up a fake cell tower, the FCC would be all over us faster than you could say ‘fake cell tower’.

Probably wouldn't get finished the first word.

[Focault's Pendulum]

A new tower was put up 3 miles from my house and I thought I was going to get great reception but I barely have any now.

It might be that your carrier is not renting space on the tower. Largely, most towers are privately owned, tho there are exceptions. The tower is then rented out to multiple users.

If you're getting a degraded signal since it's erection, it's possible someone has a frequency close to your cell phone.

RF, or radio frequency, comes in at broad band, UHF or ultra high frequency, and VHF very high frequency. All cell phones are in the upper limit of VHF.

I'm not sure if that freq was sub divided.