
Polish charity gets huge phone bill thanks to stork - tlrobinson
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-44645217
======
Symbiote
"EcoLogic told the Super Express newspaper that somebody found the tracker in
Sudan, removed the sim card and put it in their own phone, where they then
racked up 20 hours' worth of phone calls"

So they actually got a huge bill because they didn't set a SIM lock (if that's
possible), and didn't block voice calls and so on.

Presumably, they had a good contract for sending tiny packets of data, but not
for roaming calls in Sudan.

~~~
droopybuns
Sim locking is a device-side control that ensures only a specific carrier’s
sim is used in the device.

They should have used a limited IoT-oriented sim with data limits.

I kinda feel these folks were extraordinarily naive, but I’m coming from the
perspective of a telco SME.

~~~
Symbiote
I think I mean the PIN lock, the one you have to input after rebooting the
phone or inserting the SIM. This has existed since the beginning of GSM, as
far as I remember.

But probably the GPS receiver can't work with that.

~~~
droopybuns
PIN lock is right

------
pndy
It's kinda amusing I'm reading this "news" by help of HN on BBC News page.
Still, it seems to be really not interesting (typical to "silly season" or as
we're saying here in Poland "cucumber season") as no other media outlet has
copied it - well, beside Super Express but that's just a tabloid newspaper of
same level as British The Sun, and they love such - pardon the word, shit.

~~~
acobster
"Scientists rack up huge phone bill - your jaw will DROP when you learn why!"

~~~
mortenjorck
"Scientists HATE this trick to get free phone service!"

That said, while the article itself may not be much more than an anecdote, it
does seem to have inspired some interesting SIM security conversations here.

------
reubenmorais
Only tangentially related to the article, but where/how do researchers get
global coverage SIM cards that you can just put on a stork and expect to get
data/calling wherever it flies? I've looked for this before but only found
what seemed like tourist scams with very high prices per MB/minute.

~~~
pjc50
Ideally you'd get a dedicated M2M MVNO operator who'll sell you a whole stack
of them. If you just want one, you'll have to do a lot of price comparison;
Three UK have some nice deals where you can use inclusive minutes/data in some
non-EU countries as well as the standard EU free roaming.

~~~
wpietri
Does anybody know of one that doesn't charge a monthly fee? I have a product
idea where I'd like to use mobile data as a backup in case of wifi network
failure. So I'm willing to pay a higher per-MB fee if I can avoid a monthly
per-SIM fee.

~~~
m0dest
unfortunately, no carrier will do this. I suspect that this is because of
administrative fees associated with simply allocating a phone number and the
network overhead from having a device associate with cell towers when idle.

~~~
namibj
You don't need a phone number if you don't need to be called on one, and you
don't even need to be actively tracked in the home location database if you
don't need to be reached at low latency at all. Think low latency=incoming
call, no loner low latency=hourly email check. The remaining overhead is just
renewing the sim once it degrades and keeping database space to allow it to
associate if it turns the gsm module on.

~~~
wpietri
That would be ideal in my case. It's data only and I'd be happy to leave the
GSM module off 99% of the time if that made things cheaper.

~~~
namibj
See [https://www.quora.com/Do-all-SIM-cards-come-with-a-phone-
num...](https://www.quora.com/Do-all-SIM-cards-come-with-a-phone-
number/answer/Paul-Chitescu) for someone who seems to know a little more than
I do telling us that the number is not necessary for the card to work.

------
kaybe
Meanwhile, can Microsoft please add an option to Windows10 that says 'this
computer is only connected to an internal on-board network and satellite
connection, please never try to update'? That was an expensive mistake as
well.

I really wish people had started to migrate away from Windows earlier, but now
all the essential stuff is written for it and well-tested, so any choice is
hard.

~~~
kevindqc
I think there is something like that already. Look for "metered connections".

~~~
joshvm
There is, but Windows 10 will disable this functionality after a month so you
have to keep logging in to reset it. We had problems using a remote PC with a
4G dongle - programs like Office kept downloading updates even when Windows
update was disabled. Having turned on metering, we didn't even think about it
until the bill came through.

~~~
yekepa
The link:

[http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/q-how-can-i-
di...](http://www.itprotoday.com/management-mobility/q-how-can-i-disable-
windows-update)

------
isostatic
Oh good, when the kids ask _the_ difficult question -- "where does the
internet come from" \-- I can legitimately say "a stork brings it"

~~~
ccozan
Funny enough, we told our kids, in order to block youtube&co, that internet
comes once a year, with Santa. :) Not knowing, we put their tables in flight
mode. Now they are waiting for Christmas :))).

~~~
isostatic
> we put their tables in flight mode

Returned to the upright position and locked for landing?

------
nebulous1
People are saying sim lock when the mean sim pin. A sim lock, more usually,
locks a phone to a particular network's sim cards, stopping the consumer
changing networks.

------
acranox
This was not the stork’s fault.

~~~
aalleavitch
Personally I think the stork was the one who made the phone calls. Just
getting back for them putting a tracker on him.

------
davidhyde
The title should read "Sudanese opportunist trains storks to collect sim cards
from Poland"

------
tzs
That's reminiscent of this incident from a few years ago [1]. A women in
Australia took a SIM card from an electric meter and used it to download a
bunch of movies and make a lot of calls, which the electric company found out
when they got a bill for A$200k.

I can't find a link, but I have a vague recollection of a similar thing
happening in the US.

Some cellular providers have data plans specifically for things like remote
sensors that need to periodically reports small amounts of data, such as few
hundred bytes an hour. They have low data caps and astronomical per kilobyte
charges if you go over the cap.

[1]
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/02/stolen_sim_woman_ja...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/02/stolen_sim_woman_jailed/)

~~~
decryption
The woman who did that was sent to jail for 18 months too!
[[http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-02/woman-jailed-for-it-
th...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-02/woman-jailed-for-it-
theft/2697612\]\(http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-05-02/woman-jailed-for-it-
theft/2697612\))

Pretty harsh I reckon.

------
7952
These trackers are interesting devices. There is a model that uses a light
detector to estimate location. It has a clock onboard and can record the time
of dawn and dusk. The time of dawn gives an indication of longitude. The
length of day latitude.

------
iliis
There was a similiar case in South Africa, where SIM cards were stolen from
traffic lights and also racked up large bills:
[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-
africa-12135841](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-12135841)

------
digi_owl
Speculating here, but i suspect there was no pin or similar so that people in
the field could just power it on, attach it to a bird, and let the bird go.

Never mind that i suspect that the data amount was not much more than a sms
with a GPS position sent to a fixed number every X hours.

------
llampx
They should have either set a SIM lock or reported the SIM as lost once they
stopped receiving signals from it. They presumably thought it may come online
later or may have forgotten about it. Expensive mistake.

~~~
jwilk
SIM lock is a restriction built into mobile phones, not into SIM cards. It
does nothing to prevent SIM card abuse.

~~~
smileybarry
No, SIM locks (specifically the pin code kind) program the SIM card to refuse
to initialise unless you enter the correct code. It's the actual card that
asks for a code, the phone merely forwards the authentication request to the
user.

~~~
krzyk
Popularly sim lock is something different see
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock)

What you write is more of a PIN lock.

~~~
jwilk
Non-mobile link:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIM_lock)

------
mobilio
I wondering why SIM card wasn't Data-Only without voice?

~~~
Rjevski
Because most carriers are shit and don't even allow you to set policies on
what the SIM can be used for.

I have a bunch of M2M SIMs here and they are capable of making calls using a
number I didn't even know existed. The SIMs are marketed as M2M and the
provider claims voice calls are _not possible_ despite me having proof of the
opposite by calling them from it.

Thankfully their billing systems don't even mention voice anywhere, but surely
if I rack up a big enough bill they'll manually send me the invoice for that.

------
isostatic
So why is there a charity to do with polishing a table?

------
isk517
In Sudan it is quite common for people to hunt storks in order to harvest
their valuable SIM cards.

~~~
jnbiche
You're kidding, but you don't think that once word gets around some
desperately poor region that tracker device == free phone calls, people aren't
going to try and kill the bird to get the tracker?

If you think that's not likely, you've got a lot more faith in humanity than I
do.

~~~
lallysingh
Then they'll find that the Sim cards are locked and don't work, and will stop
wasting their time on them.

~~~
TomMarius
Except that they mostly _do_ work

~~~
mynameisvlad
Voice calls can be disabled remotely on the carrier side. Just because they
worked this one instance doesn't mean future ones will. And especially after
they had a 2k+ phone bill, you know they're scrambling to lock down any
remaining SIM cards out there.

