REAL LIFE NEWS: BIRD TRACKING SIM STOLEN THEN USED TO RACK UP BIG BILL
by Hazed
A charity in Poland has been landed with a big telephone bill, after a tracking device on a white stork was stolen and the sim card used to make lots of expensive calls.
Grupa EkoLogiczna attached the tracking device, which contained a sim card and a GPS unit, to the back of the bird in April 2017 while it was spending the spring in Poland. The intention was to track the progress of the stork, which was given the name Kajtka by the scientists, as it migrated south to Africa.
Kajtka made the trip safely and then in February this year it started to head north to spend time in Europe once again. After ten days, the stork had reached the Blue Nile valley in Sudan. The tracker shows the bird stopped there and did not move again. Presumably something unpleasant had happened to Kajtka, and the bird had died.
Then things got odd. After ten days the signal showed the tracker moving again. It took a 16 mile trip on a rather circuitous route, and then went dead.
Then in June, the charity got a shock when their mobile phone company sent them a bill for Kajtka’s tracker, which showed it had been used for 20 hours of expensive phone calls.
The assumption is that after the stork died, someone found the tracker, took it apart, and then started to use the sim to make free phone calls. The bill came to 10,000 zloty (£2,010, $2,648).
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/stork_mobile_theft/
