The Nokia 1100 mystery: Why are criminals reportedly paying $32,000 for a five-year-old cellphone?

By Chris Parry, Vancouver SunApril 22, 2009

The mysterious Nokia 1100 cellphone. Criminal elements are reportedly offering as much as $32,000 for used versions of this phone that were produced in Bochum Germany in 2002, due to an alleged exploit that potentially allows banking fraud.Photograph by: Handout, ..

If you've got a drawer filled with derelict electrical circuits, cables and cellphones, you might want to have a good look at its contents. Seems if you're the owner of an old Nokia 1100 cellphone that was made in a factory in Bochum Germany around 2002, you could be sitting on a gold mine.

Well, a small gold mine. Okay, a small car in need of an oil change. Still ... bonus!

Seems Russian, Moroccan and Romanian crime gangs are offering as much as $32,000 for a functioning Nokia 1100 to sellers through Craigslist and eBay, as well as underground black market websites.

Why would they do such a thing? Because that version of the 1100 was one of the first produced and allegedly has a flaw in the firmware that allows it to be reprogrammed to receive someone else's phone number. Because cellphone banking is big business in Europe, such a hack would allow euro-gangsters to intercept another person's banking ID codes, which would make it possible to transfer money at their will.

Or at least that's the rumour. Suffice to say, the gangsters aren't exactly clamouring to confirm it, and Nokia officials simply shrug and say they're not aware of any reason why anyone would pay above the odds for an 1100 handset.

The original Nokia 1100 sold for around $100. Some 200 million of them were produced, mostly for sale in developing world countries, though a large number ended up being used as 'disposable' phones by drug dealers.

A Dutch security company, Ultrascan, is actively pursuing one of the handsets in question so they can attempt to replicate the hack, but competition for the aging electronica is somewhat fierce. That rapid rise in prices being paid for the phone is what reportedly alerted security experts to the potential exploit.

You can buy a stock standard Nokia 1100 on eBay for $0.99 (plus $15 shipping), but the specific kind of handset required by the criminal element is a little harder to come by. For those, you're looking at $700 on most online market sites, which is still a decent return on a phone most would use as a doorstop.

cparry@vancouversun.com