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August 21, 2019 04:47 pm

T-Mobile 'Put My Life in Danger' Says Woman Stalked With Black Market Location Data

Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: Ruth Johnson didn't know exactly who rang her phone and threatened her around 20 times in 2014. The person on the other end said he was John Edens from the U.S. Marshals with a warrant for her arrest for stealing a car. She was behind on her payments. It later turned out John Edens didn't have a warrant, nor was he from law enforcement at all. Instead, he was a debt collector with a history of stalking and domestic violence who had managed to get hold of Johnson's phone location data. He did this by pretending to be a U.S. Marshal with the "Georgia Fugitive Task Force" to T-Mobile, which then provided Edens with the location of Johnson's phone in a handy Google Maps interface -- "pinging" the phone, in industry parlance. "Fearful," is the word Johnson first used to explain the episode in a phone call with Motherboard. "It was very fearful." Motherboard previously reported on Edens' case using court documents and sources in the bounty hunting industry; Edens was sentenced to one year in prison for impersonating a U.S. officer. Now, Johnson explained in an interview what it was like to have her phone tracked. Her story demonstrates the very real human impact that the black market use and sale of phone location data can have. "I was very upset with the phone company, because I was under the impression that you had to get [a] court order in order to get information such as that out," she said. T-Mobile "put my life in danger," she added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/2CfUlY8tiKM/t-mobile-put-my-life-in-danger-says-woman-stalked-with-black-market-location-data

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