Investigating Pre-Paid Cell Phones

No name is required. No I.D. check. No billing information. No questions asked. Just walk into Wal-Mart or any other outlet that sells prepaid cell phones and you’ll walk out with a working phone line that’s virtually impossible to trace. If you’re a bad guy in the crime business, this is a good thing. If your job is tracking down bad guys, it’s a bad thing.
 

I recently put out posts on investigative list serves asking for phone numbers that were absolutely, positively known to be for prepaid cell phones. The phone numbers were then run through NPA/NXX data to see how they would come up. Here are the results:

• Tracfone comes up as Verizon or T-Mobile or Cingular
• Boost Mobile comes up as Sprint or Nextel
• Go Phone comes up as AT&T
• T-Mobile To Go comes up as T-Mobile
• MetroPCS comes up as MetroPCS or Royal Street Communications
• Cricket comes up as Cricket or Leap Wireless

A private investigator who gets a hit through NPA/NXX data showing a cell phone is with a major cell service like Verizon should heed warning. He may subpoena the records, only to find it’s been leased to Tracfone. A new subpoena is directed at Tracfone, only to learn that no subscriber information is on file. In the two weeks it took to get subpoena results returned from the phone companies, the bad guy has since tossed the phone out the car window and already has a new one. The investigator might be feeling like he’s been tossed out the window, too.

Robert Scott is a Los Angeles-based private investigator and author of The Investigator's Little Black Book. 

© 2008 Crime Time Publishing Co., Inc. Originally published at www.CrimeTime.com

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