In March of last year, a case was filed by the police (police) in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, China, that they had been scammed (smissed) by texting a mobile phone.
The amount of damage was 6,400 yuan, about 1.1 million won in our money.
The police tracked the number from which the text was sent, which was the cell phone number of a 75-year-old man in Sichuan Province.
During a police investigation, the old man said he had never sent text messages, but communication records showed that 380 text messages were sent over 200 telephones in three months, and 2G Internet was also used.
There was a suspicion of hacking a smartphone.
The elderly were using the so-called'feature phone', which is a mobile phone equipped with various functions for the elderly, not a smartphone.
Sichuan Provincial Public Security confirmed that a hacking program was embedded in this elderly mobile phone, and through this, the mobile phone was remotely controlled from outside to send text messages.
The old man's mobile phone was made at a factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China.
While investigating manufacturers and others, the public security confirmed that the hacking program had been planted from the time of manufacture of the mobile phone, not through external downloads.
The public security then struck a science and technology company in Shenzhen, a company created by the hacking criminal gang.
They installed a chip with their own hacking program on the motherboard and left the cell phone manufacturer to assemble it.
Cell phones made in this way were illegally distributed under the brand of other companies that were stolen or their own trademarks, or were put on the market through normal routes.
The public security confiscated mobile phones with hacking programs that were about to be shipped, and the number reached 20,000.
The hacking program created by this organization was created by adding functions such as text message management and app subscription based on the actual mobile phone sales statistics program. When a mobile phone communication card is inserted, the mobile phone number is automatically sent, and automatically It connects to a back-end server through a network, allowing you to control the target phone, the publican explained.
Using this, they secretly subscribed to additional services, sent fraudulent text messages, or intercepted various authentication numbers, but they could not be found at all unless the owner printed out the communication record.
Chinese prosecutors have prosecuted 19 people per day, and they have committed cell phone hacking crimes since 2013, and the number of damaged cell phones has reached millions, and the amount related to the crime is 200 million yuan, or about 34 billion.
At the end of last year, Zhejiang Public Security also arrested a gang who sold an elderly cell phone who had planted a hacking program.
The number of mobile phone numbers activated by the hacking programs they planted reached 3.3 million, and it was found that most of them were stolen trademarks and sold at low prices in Internet shopping malls.
According to Chinese media such as Pengpai, hacking crime gangs have been targeting elderly mobile phones that are easy to modify and manufacture as it is difficult to secure real-name mobile phones due to crackdowns and strengthening systems.
In fact, in China, mobile phones for seniors are only a few tens of thousands of won in our money.
In addition, many elderly people are unfamiliar with electronic devices, making it difficult to find out that they have been hacked, making them a target of crime.
Among the gangs arrested in the public prosecutors' office included workers in the mobile phone communication business and graduate students in the past, it was revealed that they also planned crimes that modified children's cell phone watches and smartphones.
(Photo = Pengpai, China)