>I guess anything can happen at least once to anyone. Last night I came to >the realization that my cell phone may have been cloned ..............SNIP... >No doubt there will be a fall-out from all of this. Relax. It happened to me a year or two ago, and turned out to be no big deal at all. For years, my monthly bill averaged $50-90. Then one fine day my bill arrives, and instead of the usual one page, it's SIX pages long, with hundreds of calls originating from, and directed to, all over Southern California, Western Arizona, and Northern Mexico. (I'm in San Diego.) The bill was just under $5,000. Imagine my surprise. So I called the Service Provider (AirTouch Cellular) and started to explain that there'd been a mixup of some sort. Before I got very far, they stopped me and said something to the effect of "Oh, you've been cloned." I'd never heard of such a thing, so they told me how it's done. Told me to not pay any of the bill in question, but to wait a month. Since I'd been a customer for so many years, it would be easy for them to examine the $5k bill and determine which calls were mine; the following month's bill would show only calls that had obviously been mine. Of course, they disabled my phone number immediately, and gave me a new one. Believe it or not, everything worked *exactly* as they said it would. Other than having to change my number, the only impact this episode had on my life (and wallet) was the five minute phone call I just described. Yay ! Haven't had any trouble since, and I recently got a new digital cell phone which is supposedly clone-proof. Hope everything goes as smoothly for you as it did for me. Tom Myler "The young person knows the rules; The old person knows the exceptions."
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