APPARATUS FOR DETECTING AND PREVENTING SUBSCRIBER NUMBER CLONING IN A CELLULAR MOBILE TELEPHONE SYSTEM

摘要

This apparatus (101) operates to discern temporal and spatial anomalies in the use of subscriber numbers in the cellular mobile telephone system, which anomalies are typically indicative of cloning of valid subscriber numbers. The detection of a bogus subscriber unit (B) is accomplished by recording the call origination and termination patterns associated with the subscriber number. The cloning detection apparatus (101) makes use of call origination data to identify concurrent call originations or receptions for a single subscriber number. Further analysis also includes a spatial analysis of successive call activity for a subscriber number. If two successive calls for a particular subscriber number are detected in a time interval that is too short to justify the geographic separation of the subscriber unit (B) for the two successive calls, then this apparatus identifies these two call connections as including one subscriber unit (B) having a cloned subscriber number,