South African wireless traffic lights pillaged by SIM-card thieves The Johannesburg Road Agency is in talks with suppliers to try and stop thieves targeting its shiny new traffic lights for the SIM cards they contain. The Agency has been forking out thousands of rand on phone calls the thieves subsequently make using the snaffled SIMs. Thulani Makhubela, spokesman for the JRA, said: “The JRA …
It's often easier to add remote control to traffic lights by wireless than dig the road up.
Why do they need remote control? Well so the whole sequence across the town can be changed a few months before congestion charging is introduced, then changed back to how it was the day congestion charging goes live... That was traffic flow is bound to improve (at least to how it used to be), and a PR success is declared...
Oh, hang on, that was London. silly me.
Most significant traffic light systems are centrally managed these days. Intervals and so on are controlled by the traffic flows. I remember our Traffic boys were almost happy a few years ago when their (private sector) supplier stuffed up and the lights of [redacted town/city name] went on local control for the day. The place snarled up in gridlock, and the folks had a nice control to demonstrate what they are doing really worked.
Mobile tech is now sufficiently cheap that its more cost effective to user wireless on the lights than to get BT or whoever to run copper to them. Of course most major British systems are largely copper because been there for a few years, so don't bother trying to raid your local traffic lights for SIM cards...
Copper wires == scrap metal == money. Wireless has appeal because you can't steal air. These guys even wait for an Eskom blackout so they can steal high voltage power cables. They loved the planned rolling blackouts because they could plan their activities.
When I lives in South Africa there was a remote light house that was monitored via 25 km of phone wires. which got stolen on a regular basis. They gave up when the thieves stole the truck + wire when still on rolls.
If the SIMs could be limited to be used for low rate GPRS with cellular modems then that would make them worthless for Johnny Average.
Almost everywhere around the world the traffic lights along major routes are synchronised so if you keep to an optimal speed (usually around 2/3 of the speed limit) you catch the green wave and never stop. In the UK this practice was considered to deprive the exchequer of petrol duty revenue and councils were prohibited from using it till as recently as a couple of years back. So having traffic lights along major routes talk to each other is actually a very good idea and is the de-facto standard outside the UK.
Coming back to SA - in most places around the world (UK included) traffic light management uses copper pairs from the telephone network. From what I know about SA telecoms, that is a solution which is not well suited for them. Out of the developed countries, SA leads in fixed-line replacement services from mobile operators for a reason - they do not have that much copper in the ground. So using mobile for that in SA is not surprising. There is a number of EU telecommunications operators which are going down the same route and offering mobile connectivity for ATMs, credit card terminals, telemetry - all services traditionally associated with copper. It is only a matter of time until we see mobile-enabled traffic lights in the UK as well.
As far as the authority "having a problem"... Well... They got the wrong contract, the wrong service and they failed to configure the device and the SIM.
First of all - true fixed line replacement services have mobility turned off. As vodafone SA is ahead of let's say Mobiltel or Telecom Austria in EU in this I would be surprised if they do not have a product with this feature.
Second, you should be able to barr all the "problematic" calls on the device in the first place.
Third, I would not be surprised if the miscreants are "well organised". Of course they are. Nobody steals SIMs like this for personal use. They are stolen and auto-dialed to a complicit premium number operator which shares the revenue with whoever stole it. That is textbook fraud and if the traffic authority cannot recover its money there are some interesting questions to be asked...
re depriving the tax --
I'm having a hard time getting my head round this.. is it possible this isn't correct and the bbc is wrong about this? Seriously if there's any basis on this shouldn't this open the way for a massive lawsuit against the government?
apart from wasting fuel and increasing co2 emissions which supposedly the gov has had as a target in one way or another since long before 2009, it causes other damage to vehicles, frustration not to mention loss of productivity.
How about we sue for lost earnings, extra wear and tear on our vehicles , extra fuel consumption and even extra wear and tear on the roads themselves.
Am I the only one seing red here?? It's like me, a system support engineer, creating faults on the network so that I get more callouts afaics.
But also if true this is just monumental stupidity, even if we say that its' ok to want to increase tax revenue by any means necessary - this would in fact have the opposite effect as everyone would just reduce travel by car because if taken to the extreme and just having cars waiting at lights all day then people will stop using their cars (if they haven't burned down all the lights in the meantime)
I've often wondered though how they are meant to be synced - cause most of the time there is a wave of green to be had if you speed - and sometimes excessively over the speed limit and sometimes end up doing it not because I want to speed, but because I just cannot stand waiting at traffic lights...Seriously I think I'm gonna start asking questions about this ... Where to write the FOIA requests on this I wonder??...
""In the UK this practice was considered to deprive the exchequer of petrol duty revenue and councils were prohibited from using it till as recently as a couple of years back. "
Citation needed. Or at the very least please supply the barcode on your tin-foil helmet."
Apparently the BBC said so: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7998182.stm
I'd still like to see what the actual DfT guidance said.
You are right about thieves using these stolen cards to call high priced call services.
I would think it should be a no-brainer that ANY country, person or legitimate organization would should CANCEL any fraudulent charges.
The receipent of the money from the crime (the phone number being called) should ALSO BE CHARGED WITH THE CRIME!!!. Sure we may have to prove their guilt to lock them up, but their phone records, bank accounts etc should ALL be subject to investigation when they are recieving funds from calls from stolen phones.
If their personal shit gets looked into when they commit this crime, if the phone operators BY DEFAULT - CANCEL any disputed charges THEN THE CRIMINALS WILL STOP WHEN THEY CANT MAKE MONEY THIS WAY!!! (make the 900 operator recover the bill in court like everyone else has too).
"In the UK this practice was considered to deprive the exchequer of petrol duty revenue and councils were prohibited from using it till as recently as a couple of years back. So having traffic lights along major routes talk to each other is actually a very good idea and is the de-facto standard outside the UK."
The UK has had synchronised traffic lights for a long time. TRANSYT was (and still is to a large extent) the software which does the calculations for it. TRANSYT goes back to the days of punched card data entry.
Specifically in Johannesburg, the likelyhood of lightning damage to kit connected by copper pairs is enormous. As it is we lose huge numbers of traffic lights either drowned or struck during the storm season. Add some extra wiring in there and I think you could get close to 100% failure over December.
How much is a few tubs of Superglue, so that the SIMS can only be removed by wrecking them?
Or if not that, a deal with the network operators so that the SIMs in question cannot be used for making voice calls?
Anyway, thanks for the idea, I've seen these on traffic lights round here recently. Where's me (SIM) toolkit?
A lot of traffic lights round these parts seem to have acquired odd gray boxes and aerials on top of them recently. I presumed it was some kind of trial by the council because it seems to be quite a rural location for traffic management.
But methinks it's time to break out the hammer and go get some free SIM's. It's only South Lanarkshire Council (who recently gave some money to a Nigerian general and nearly closed a dozen schools because someone forgot to carry the 1 in a budget) so no doubt they are open to all uses.
A few thousand rand is a few hundred pounds. It would be more, except that south african law requires stolen phones/simcards to be reported to the police and the service provider (within 24 hours, I think). I doubt the cards are being used for any sort of sophisticated fraud - more likely they're being sold on to consumers as "Free phone calls". Reason being both we don't have the sort of expensive premium rate numbers that you've got in .uk, and that the phone bills are so low.
There was a similar scam in the UK. The AA had set up a string of wirelessly connected emergency telephones along the early motorway network. Each was powered by a car battery in the base that was presumably replaced with a freshly charged one at a regular interval. Thereby helping to keep the British motorist moving (hence the thumbs up).
Who ever is making these calls is calling somebody.
Start locking up all the receipients of the phone calls until they talk.
Problem solved.
Hell you nab the leeches off society and lock them up, you'll probably solve a lot of other related crime problems as well.
Sounds like an organized effort and the police head should be fired for not being more alert and reactive.
400! 400! out of 600. I will be you money they never even bothered to stake out a few lights and nab the thieves. Lock them up and wait until they talk and you can get the asshole running the whole show.
The Jo'burg traffic guys should have a little chat with their cellco provider.
It is extremely simple to program the Class of Service so that given SIMs can only dial pre-determined numbers. This would eliminate the reason for the thefts - wide open dialling plans.
Another alternative is to use equipment where the SIM data is held within a memory chip - this is used on miniature data collection systems when the luxury of circuit-board real estate is at a premium or where the data capture/transmission systems are encapsulated for weather proofing purposes.
One system in Indochina uses only SMS transmissions - very quick 'burst' data - which can also be controlled by Class of Service eliminating the ability to use voice. Mind you, the Chinese built system has poor reliability, the 'counting' displays often go into reverse - counting up, rather than down, to the next light sequence.
Speaking as a pedestrian I have observed "odd" behaviour on a regular training run, group of several runners hitting green pedestrian lights in sequence over a route with a couple of "complex" junctions involved, these junctions usually require a button press to activate the pedestrian sequence, so, either there is an IR detection system seeing a group of runners as a vehicle and switching the lights to pedestrian, or there is a " Deity of your Choice" who is busy training for next years London / Edinburgh / Cardiff Marathon and is switching the sequence to optimise the training regime.
This is one case wheher off the shelf parts shouldn't be used. If there is enough of a need for these cards and it sounds like there is then a special version should be created that is totally incompatible with any phone (different voltage requirement, pin-out, shape, etc.) and they should be restricted as to what kinds of functionality they offer. This is a case of the manufacturer doing things on the cheap where in this case it hurt the purchaser of their product.
Data transmissions and voice calls are made using different transmitters by the mobile phone and on different frequencies.
It's absolutely trivial to limit a mobile phone to data only. Indeed, I recently had to replace a SIM for my T Mobile 3G stick, and they provided me with a conventional voice call SIM, which then had to be configured (converted) to data only.
I'm not a mobile comms expert, but this feature will be implemented in either:
a list of services inside the SIM card, or a list of services for that particular SIM is able to use, which is held by the network.
I work in a telcoms/data comms company: everything is about services routed over telecoms equipment, everything is service based. Voice traffic will be a service, data traffic will be a different service. The idea that a telecoms provider can't control/restrict the services for a particular subscriber is just nonsense.
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