Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related untraceable calls

I am trying to figure out exactly how a call from a cell phone would be completely untraceable. It seems to me that even if you used a stolen, pre-paid, or disposable phone to keep your identity from being known, wouldn't the tower that took your call give a pretty good idea of your location? I've heard of bouncing the call off many towers or satelites. . .

I'm just trying to make a believable explanation for why a 5 second phoen call would not be traceable even to the continent that it originated form.

Any ideas from electronic saavy FoLC out there?

Depends on the resources available. Today it could be done by using the internet.

In the 1990s call forwarding could trick things a little.

Cell A places a call to cell b which is inside a box shipped to a post office in the USA. The ringer has been disabled so no sound is heard.

Cell B has call forwarding setup to Cell C which is inside a box shipped to a post office in the USA. It call forwards to yet another Cell phone in the same circumstances.

A couple of cell phones later the call is sent to a Cell phone inside a post office somewhere in Europe. it forwards to the final number.


So you place your call to Cell A it is bumped to cell b then to cell c then to cell d and so on till the last cell forwards the call to the number you want to reach.

Should take a minute or so to locate each link giving you a few minutes to play with.

Even more fun. With T-mobile voice mail I can record a message on my cell's voicemail for delayed delivery to another tmobile cell. so use the prepaid cell to setup the message, crush and dispose of the cell and ship the remains out of state.

I would think that 5 seconds would make it untraceable especially if it was a prepaid phone. I know that cell phones now are suppose to have GPS in them for 911 purposes. But I would think as with a regular phone that such a short time frame would make it impossible for the system to the call.

In a big city location via the cell phone system doesn't work very well. There are a lot of small cells with plenty of overlap, the phone locks onto the clearest one which isn't necessarily the nearest mast. You could at best pin it down to a couple of blocks.

One easy way to mess up the system even more would be to use an external directional antenna on your cellphone, which you aim at a cellphone mast some distance away - this could be as simple as a metal can open at one end, with the antenna at the bottom, although a dish (which could be as simple as a metal colander) would be better. Let's say that someone wants to appear to send a call from the vicinity of the Daily Planet building, that there's a mast on the Planet roof and they're in another office block a couple of miles away. If there's a clear line of sight this ought to work reasonably well. With the analogue cell phones in use in the 1990s the sound would be a little fuzzy and distorted, which would be a clue that something odd was going on.

To complicate this, a lot of modern phones incorporate GPS antennae, which allows 911 calls etc. to trace the origin of signals, but that wasn't the case in the L&C era as far as I know. In any case it takes a while for GPS to lock on to get a location, so if you shoved the batteries in just before making the call it would probably be over before there was an accurate GPS fix.

On rereading the original message, the route taken by the call (e.g. what network it was sent from etc.) will be on record, there simply isn't a way around it, so it probably isn't possible to hide your location beyond a mile or two. Satellite phones don't work without a GPS lock as far as I know. The call forwarding etc. mentioned in another message probably works better.

Cell phone triangulation requires the user to be in the vicinity of three cell phone towers. If it's in a rural area with not a lot of coverage, it's much harder to find the person beyond a general idea of what 'area' they're in. It's one of the problems cell phones cause emergency services when they're trying to figure out where the caller is calling from so they can send help. At least, this is what I have read in research for some of my current writing projects.

Hubby works as a tech for AT&T. As others have mentioned, you could be tracked via triangulation. He says that as long as you were in range of 3 towers to triangulate your position (which you would almost have to be out in the middle of the desert not to be within range <g> or a very, very rural area) you can be located. If there is a lock, it is very accurate, it would be within just a few blocks of your location.

And yes, most newer phones have GPS in them as well.

And like Marcus said - it doesn't matter that the phone call is only 5 seconds long - if there is a connection, there is a record of the call (and what towers the phone was in range of) and can be located from that record.

Hope that helps!

-- DJ

Another thought on this - I think I'm right to say that one of the reasons why people are asked not to use cell phones on planes is that altitude increases the number of cells a phone can reach - someone hovering a couple of miles above Metropolis might block one of the frequencies used in dozens of cells, not just the two or three a cellphone usually utilises. So if Clark ever uses his cell phone while flying he might get some awkward questions from the FCC...

I thought it was because cell phones could interfere with plane radio chatter and functions. But I never looked it up.

I recently read an article that says that cell phones would not interfere with the planes equipment. I think the main reasons for not allowing it is so that they can charge a high rate to use their phones. Also I use to know a guy that was always messing with his tech gear to get better usage of one sort of another from them. So with his altered gear who knows if it might interfere.

YUP, the newer phones do not interfere with planes et.al...

it was the older-gen ones (analogue?, I don''t know the terminology) that would interfere with the planes... these have been out of circulation for something up to 10 years (in Australia at least)...


from watching LAW & ORDER (lol, i know my source is really reliable):
if you used the internet to make the "call" and spoke over the computer's input and output devices... that would make the call only traceable to your local server... and many programs exist now that would do the A-B-C-D thingy mentioned above, in a random pattern, making the "call" virtually untraceable... in a much more readily accessible fashion...


also
some numbers themselves are "Silent", meaning that ordinary phones will not trace their source for caller-id etc. and even top of the range tracers find them hard to trace...as the phone-company does not release the number.... a lot depends on the equipment tracing the call, and the length of time spent connected, as it allows for the tracer to have longer access to your details...

To make it untraceable even after the fact the best bet would be to relay it through some place that still has the old mechanical step by step phone central offices. Once the call is ended if its a local call there is no record. That would require either being in the local area of one of those or setting up ahead of time in the local area a setup where when you dial into one phone a device dials out on another line and patches them together. And even at the time of the show only really old offices would have that. So a smal town or someplace in the third world.