January 10, 2006
Cell phone tracing helps nab criminals
... Investigative technologies for public telephones, cell phones and automobiles have improved significantly. A senior National Police Agency official said, "Kidnapping for ransom has become a crime in which criminals can't expect to succeed", reports TMCnet from Tokyo.
"A cell phone was used first in a kidnapping case in that of a Fuji Bank clerk in Minato Ward, Tokyo, in November 1991. Such phones are said to be difficult to trace compared with public phones.
Since then, a prepaid cell phone and a cell phone registered in another person's name have been used to prevent police tracing the perpetrator of a kidnapping, including that of a second-grade primary school student of Yokohama in April 2000.
But even if police fail to trace a cell phone, it is still possible to narrow down the whereabouts of the user within a radius of several hundreds meters, as long as the power is on. As a result of technological advances and cooperation between cell phone companies and police, the ability to trace cell phones has improved greatly, leading to a number of arrests in recent years.
A law aimed at confirming the identity of cell phone users was enforced in April 2005. Due to the law, it is difficult to obtain such a phone in another person's name."
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