More than 500 000 000 GSM phones are used in the world nowadays and they transmit a great amount of various information – political, financial, economic, legal, medical and private. It is extremely dangerous if criminal elements use this information and it may lead to catastrophic consequences for a state, a corporation and private persons:
Kidnapping. Children who have rich parents are mostly vulnerable. Speaking on a GSM phone criminals may falsify parents’ voices and lure children out to kidnap. The profit from kidnapping all over the world is tremendous, it is hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars. Voice falsification is the easiest and the cheapest way that makes kidnapping easy.
Voice falsification and speech concept modification of politicians, speaking over GSM phones. These false conversations may be published in press with appropriate comments. The governments of many countries spend a hundreds of billions of dollars on the defense of their countries, but they often cannot find any money to protect phone conversations of their state officials, even if they work outside the country where it is easy to compromise them.
Voice falsification and speech modification of show-business persons. Criminal reporters may use it to launch a sensational campaign to compromise them and persue them. It may be extremely profitable for criminal reporters and gives them profit worth dozens of millions of dollars.
It often happens that information about a person’s illness is tapped from a GSM channel. The medical secret concerning a person’s illness may be made public to remove him from his post, especially when this post is high.
Falsification of conversations of church officials with the aim to initialize religious conflicts.
Theft of corporate and private confidential data to ruin the competitors.
Using personal information about people for racket and blackmail.
Technically it is rather easy to wiretap GSM conversations due to the following reasons:
The cost of an unauthorized interception and recording of GSM conversations is rather low. It costs from $1000 to $2000 to record one GSM number for one month.
The cost of wiretapping equipment is from $150000 to $600000. Its dimensions are a little bit larger than those of a portable computer. It is easy to carry and transport it. It is practically impossible to detect it. This is a so-called “passive mode”. The equipment can monitor up to 16 GSM telephone numbers. According to the magazine “La Point”, № 703 from May 5th, 2005, more than 4 000 000 Frenchmen were wiretapped in France only in 2005. Wiretapping was mostly unauthorized without the permission from the state organizations.
It is a little bit more expensive to model the voice of a person speaking over a GSM phone using a computer. The result may be disastrous.
For example, a political scandal started in the Philippines after a compromising recording with a fabricated voice of the President of the Philippines had been published in press. (BBC News, Thursday 30 June 2005).
A sensational scandal with the popular Russian singer Leonid Agutin. His voice was falsified by criminals and as a result his father passed over to the extortionist $30000.
The largest cell operators cannot control their programmers to the full extent. There are too many programmers and it is very likely some of them may work for criminals and install special equipment to wiretap and record GSM conversations. (For example, the scandal in Greece with the largest operator Vodafone. Phone conversations of the Greek Prime-minister and highest state officials were wiretapped and recorded for many years. A technical specialist learned about it quite by chance. (BBC News, Thursday, 2 February 2006).
