For less than $15, you can buy a cell phone loaded with minutes. You can buy more as you go whenever those minutes run out. Best of all, you aren’t locked into a long-term contract.

But in South Florida, New York, California, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere, traffickers have figured out they can compose big profits by purchasing thousands of these low-cost phones and tweaking the software so that calls can be made on any cell network. The altered phones

are next sold all by the world — costing the phone companies tens of millions of dollars.

Some traffickers employ dozens of public full-time as “runners” to buy the phones at retail stores so they can later be hacked into and resold. The problem for the phone companies is that they often sell the phones at a loss, instead making their money when customers have to buy additional minutes from them […]

Orginal post by Top Tech News