tracing mobile phones

Dumyat

tracing malicious text messages - how quickly or easy is it for police to be able to trace a phone where the SIM has not been registered?

barnabee

The police would normally only contact the phone service provider for information where there is a risk to life or a serious crime has been committed. If the situation was serious enough (terrorism, abduction, murder etc) then the records of the service provider may show additional information that may be useful to police enquiries even if the sim card was unregistered.

Dumyat

thanks It was more the time scale I was wondering about. can't go in to much detail here. I think they may have traced the call, I just wondered how quickly they could do it, if that was true.

epz_2

arnt there websites that you can just put the number in and locate it now.

when i worked for a mobile company i can recall 1 time the police called on the dedcated line to find out the contract details and we wernt even allowed to give out location information

Cavey

Your question is sufficiently woolly to not really make sense. Do you mean tracing the number or tracing its location?

To make a call the SIM must be active on the network. This means the provider know the SIM and IMEI of the handset used. With digitally switched exchanges, the call routing information is logged automatically for billing purposes even if caller ID is withheld. Theoretically it could be possible to see which handsets the SIM has been used in or which SIMs have been used in that handset to trace the owner and build up a profile of who might be in possession of the phone. (I once let someone use a spare handset I was carrying as their battery had died, probably not the wisest decision ever, but it has been 2 years and I am not in Guantanamo).

If you mean finding it's physical location, they can narrow it down to which cell it is in quite quickly and will know where a call was made from, but in certain areas that will be down to 5km x 5km. Getting more accurate would require monitoring the phones connection or triangulating the signal and I don't know if the phone companies have the architecture to support that (the phone would need to be in range of at least three base stations to get a decent accuracy and even then it would be subject to buildings etc...).

Actually sorting and manipulating the data would not be so hard, getting the court orders to allow this information to actually be given to the police shouldn't be "easy" (or so you'd hope), but it I would guess it would take less than a day in extreme circumstances.

arnt there websites that you can just put the number in and locate it now.

Yup. Their locating systems are not so accurate (limited by the quality of the signal and the network coverage) and as a legal requirement from people being unlawfully tracked they have to ask their consent and regularly remind them. They are mostly labelled as keeping track of your child for those who don't want to be over-bearing and walk them home, but want some added peace of mind.

Dumyat

thank you. I have pm'd you to explain more.