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Cellular Business
May, 1995 The Law Enforcement CustomerBy Roseanna DeMaria
Arming your law enforcement officers, prosecutors and legislators will improve your ride on fraud
The cellular fraud battlefield is fraught with hidden landmines that, unfortunately, have the benefit of surprise on their side. A well-planned fraud management strategy, however, capitalizes on the predictable problems by foresight and preparation. Customer care is a vital part of any fraud management plan. Traditionally, this aspect of fraud management has meant the methods and communications we use to address fraud’s negative impact on our legitimate customers. However, in today’s fraud arena, the customer care issue must address new customer care needs because of additional “customers” beyond our legitimate subscribers. We have three customers in the fraud management customer care area: the legitimate subscriber, the criminal and law enforcement. Each of these customers have different needs. Consequently, we need to send a unique message to each customer category. To the legitimate subscriber, we want to convey an understanding of what cellular fraud is in order to dispel the fear and misunderstandings created by the unknown. The educated customer will better understand the need for self-defense fraud services such as personal identification numbers. We also should convey to our customers our commitment to the fraud fight by informing them of our efforts. In that fight, we are protecting their privacy and property rights, along with our own. The criminal is also our “customer,” albeit an unwanted one. This customer’s priority is anonymity. At first blush, the counterfeit phone services this need. Its trackability, along with our investigative tools, however, can discourage these customers. Our customer care message to the criminal customer should be clear and undiluted: We know where you are, what you are doing and who you are doing it with — and we will stop you. The law enforcement customer can be a valuable resource in marketing the above message to the criminal customer. Therefore, our customer care in this area should be well-planned and sensitive to this customer’s distinctive needs. This customer base includes law enforcement officers, prosecutors and legislators. Each category of customer may make certain demands on us in the form of subpoenas, court orders or testimony. In each of those instances, our compliance should be timely, legal and professionally delivered. Examine your compliance procedures to ensure that this customer is receiving the best possible product. It is a good idea to have your in-house counsel update and review your compliance procedures in a compliance manual. With those legal guidelines, you can prepare a customer pamphlet for your law enforcement customers detailing what format is best for their requests, what they can expect in response to their legal requests, who to contact and where, and emergency contact procedures. Educating your customer in this area will prevent misunderstandings that generate the perception that a carrier is anti-law enforcement. Such perceptions of a carrier are extremely difficult to dispel. Now is a particularly useful time to re-evaluate your procedures in this area because the recently enacted Digital Telephony bill, H.R. 4922, creates problematic new compliance procedures for our industry. LAW ENFORCEMENTUnless we honestly and professionally support law enforcement’s efforts, we cannot expect this customer to have any interest in pursuing cellular fraud cases.The first step in creating law enforcement investigative interest in cellular fraud is to demonstrate the public need to address this crime. This has been accomplished by the criminals who became involved in other crimes and were arrested with their cellular fraud inventory. Law enforcement, however, did not necessarily know what the inventory was for. That is where we come in. This customer needs to understand cellular fraud just like our legitimate customers do. Without that education, an officer could be staring at cloning paraphernalia evidence while executing a narcotics search warrant or conducting a car stop, and ignore the evidence because of an uneducated investigative eye. Education in the form of training sessions or a customer care pamphlet that illustrates and explains cellular fraud would remedy this problem. The pamphlet should be user-friendly and practitioner-oriented. The “cellular speak” terms should be defined. The operation of the cellular phone should be illustrated, and the relevant law should be included.
The first step in creating law enforcement investigative interest in cellular fraud is to demonstrate the public need to address this crime.
The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA) has conducted numerous training sessions for law enforcement, and these efforts are to be commended. However, would you normally choose to outsource your customer care for a high-end business customer? Training is an opportunity to develop a relationship with your customer — your local law enforcement. It can take many forms. You may want to create a training video in which local law enforcement re-enacts cases involving clone crimes, and a prosecutor explains what chargeable crimes apply. Recently, Bell Atlantic Mobile, NYNEX and Cellular One New York created such a video to be used in the New York City Police Department’s training academy. So far, 5,000 officers have been trained thanks to CTIA and carrier efforts. This requires that we move to a new level in our training objectives. The introduction phase is complete, and now law enforcement needs better training tools. Workshop formats that provide the officers with an actual problem complete with mock call detail records and other evidence are useful. Such exercises teach the officer in a hands-on manner because he or she is asked to evaluate the evidence and to investigate to determine the criminal, the crime and potential search warrant locations. Similarly, the use of locating equipment in a workshop setting where the officers use the equipment to find and track the cellular phones that they identified in the above exercise is equally useful. Copies of the relevant state statutes and filed complaints, indictments or warrants from a carrier’s case would be excellent empowerment tools for the officer/students. These tools provide investigating officers with a tangible context for the carrier’s training and persuasive legal arguments to bring to the prosecutor. You may want to conduct a 1-day fraud fair for the law enforcement customer akin to industry product fairs. This can be an excellent vehicle for the compliance personnel to meet their customers and explain the compliance process. Fraud fighting has many “products” for the law enforcement customer, including:
Just as we would not contact our legitimate subscribers only when they sign up for service, we cannot limit our efforts to a single interface of training with these customers. All of our law enforcement customers should become part of a customer list. During the course of the year when cellular fraud legislation is passed/proposed, or when cases occur, these customers should be informed in a customer newsletter or other communications medium. Such information can prove useful in the investigative arena for officers. For example, if officers are trying to develop the necessary training and experience to qualify as experts in the cellular fraud area, these newsletters can contribute to the achievement of that goal. Officers can cite certain facts that existed in the completed cases described in your newsletter that ultimately turned out to be conclusive evidence of cellular fraud in their search warrant affidavits, and then they can point out that their present investigations have the same evidence in them. Hence, judges really should grant the officers search warrants. We, as carriers, are on the front line of the fraud war. As such, we are aware of the cellular fraud cases and their evidence made throughout the country. Thus, we are in the best position to disseminate this information to these customer who can use it to fight crime. Naturally, such communications should include a contact person at the carrier should the customer need additional information.
We have the necessary expertise and tools to develop the law enforcement base through our existing customer care and marketing departments. We simply need to address our energies in those departments to include this customer.
All the foregoing ideas are consistent with our customer car objectives and marketing goals. We have the necessary expertise and tools to develop the law enforcement customer base through our existing customer care and marketing departments. We simply need to address our energies in those departments to include this customer. PROSECUTIONProsecutors and legislators also fall into this customer category. The above-discussed projects relate more directly to police officers or investigating agents. Prosecutor and legislators have similar, but not identical, needs. In the case of legislators, they need to understand cellular fraud crimes and the public need for legislation. Our efforts with law enforcement and the educational pamphlet when placed in the hands of a lobbyist can assist this customer. If successful, these efforts can result in a cellular fraud statute that your police officer customers can use to arrest fraudsters and that your prosecutors can use to convict fraudsters. These facts illustrate the dividends that result in the investment in the law enforcement customer.Prosecutors must evaluate the evidence, decide on an investigative strategy, determine the applicable statutes and decide whether the case will be prosecuted. As such, prosecutors are a critically important law enforcement customer. This customer must have a complete understanding of the operation of the cellular phone on the cellular operating system and the anatomy of the fraud because they will have to convince a judge of the legal viability of the charges and a jury of defendants’ guilt. Consequently, prosecutors must be able to explain the evidence of this crime in persuasive and simple terms that establish proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If prosecutors do not have the necessary cellular knowledge, it is unrealistic to expect them to initiate a case in the adversary system. Carriers must provide prosecutors with a practical, working understanding of the fraud. This can be done in a manual format that also can include relevant legal applications. Every prosecutor will evaluate and probably change these applications, but the manual is a useful starting point for any lawyer. Distributing the legal applications in a fill-in-the blank format (search warrants, complaints, pen register, trap-and-trace, eavesdropping warrants, subpoenas) illustrates carriers’ commitment to assist this customer. Every training lecture that I participated in resulted in someone in the audience requesting these forms. We are in the best position to craft an expert affidavit for law enforcement because we can explain how cellular works and how the fraud is perpetrated. We can provide the indicia for the affiant to look for in any particular case. Prosecutors, like officers, also are interested in your subpoena, pen register and eavesdropping warrant procedures. that, too, should be part of the manual. Ideally, the manual should be the prosecutor’s practitioner guide to cellular fraud. ARMING THE GOOD GUYSThe recurring theme in customer care for the law enforcement customer is the necessity to arm these customers with the knowledge, skills and tools to confront cellular fraud. These tools are not limited to tracking equipment and effective compliance procedures. They also include meaningful legislation because even the most expert cellular fraud investigator is rendered helpless if he or she cannot arrest the criminal. The efforts spent on these customer care services send a clear message to our criminal customers that we are seriously committed to eliminating them from our customer base.
DeMaria is corporate vice president of revenue security for McCaw Cellular Communications, Kirkland, WA. She spearheads the development of technological solutions to cellular fraud and implements preventive fraud management systems.
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