Network theft

Recently, one of my acquaintances had a not very pleasant story. One morning, when he was collecting his daughter in kindergarten, investigators visited him. The purpose of their visit was to investigate the theft of equipment from one of Yekaterinburg providers.

The equipment was stolen from the operator's site, which was located at the entrance of a residential building. The tenants of the house without a doubt described the person whose signs coincided with the appearance of the hero of my story. The police did not have to search for him for a long time, because the young man knew the young man at the office and immediately indicated the address of his place of residence, because my friend worked for a long time on the staff of the operator and served those very communication centers. No wonder that the residents who have repeatedly seen a young man in their stairwell with various tools and incomprehensible equipment in their hands also pointed at it.

Apparently, the police decided that the case had already been solved, and during the interrogation they suggested to my friend that he should confess everything, promising to leave it to the court under an undertaking not to leave. But he had an iron alibi - at the time when the theft was committed, he was playing football with us, which could be confirmed by more than ten people.

In general, these thieves were able to be found sometime later thanks to surveillance cameras, which one of the residents of the entrance put. They clearly managed to capture the young people carrying equipment in the hands of the operator. It turned out that they were also employees of the operator, and they decided to steal from their own company.
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What is this preface? And besides, I would like to talk below about the thefts of equipment from telecom operators. About why so many cases of thefts on operators' infrastructure have been told to us by a person who has been cooperating with major cellular operators in the country for many years.

Cellular networks and Internet networks penetrate into the most remote corners of the country. Construction is underway, and large operators are trying more to put such work in the hands of third-party companies. As a result, the work is passed from hand to hand, sometimes reaching small brigades of workmen who are not distinguished by professionalism. On the background of this approach, we have already written.

On the one hand, the transfer of network servicing to outsourcing saves fabulous sums to operators, but on the other hand you carry with you a bunch of problems - after all, accidents on networks occur not only because of poor-quality work of installation teams, but also because of equipment thefts. Often, theft and looting on the infrastructure of the operator arises from the fact that dishonest contractors simply do not pay the workers. As a result, the latter rush into all grave, trying to somehow compensate for their work. In the network you can even find a list of such careless contractors.





Those who engage in looting at the facilities infrastructure operators, can be divided into two camps.

The first are ordinary thieves. They do not understand the equipment, but mostly just cut the cable in the hope of picking up some copper. Or grab the iron, which is unrealistic to sell for them.

Others are specialists who understand equipment. Often these are installers who are not paid by the contractor, and in this way they try to compensate for their work.

According to a person who is confronted with similar incidents in his work, for the most part the performers who decided to steal equipment from the customer’s facilities do not even know where to sell it, because apart from the operator, nobody needs it.







As we learned, much of the stolen equipment from the Urals is sent to the north of the country, where now there is an active construction of networks. They do not hesitate to use stolen equipment. By the way, such iron is easy to identify, since a barcode is hung on each device. By barcode, you can determine the SN, PN, name of the equipment, as well as who received it, when, etc. Often, sellers simply do not know the real value of the iron they have stolen, which again speaks about how they got it, the spontaneity of the theft itself.





There are those who are well versed in the issue and know that you need to steal in order to then be guaranteed to sell. Such iron includes feeder, power cable, ground cable, power systems, batteries, air conditioners, radio relay lines, switches. In VKontakte groups you can find a lot of ads for the sale of such equipment.




According to our source, vandalism reached unimaginable scales with the active construction of Tele2 networks in Moscow. Construction wanted to lay as soon as possible. As a result, to work attracted anyone. Mostly in the capital, columnar positions were installed with “Energomera” boxes. The problem was that almost all the boxes could be opened with one set of keys. In each box they put at least 4 batteries. As a result, the thieves took a few minutes to remove the battery. One such theft could bring about five thousand rubles. Then, almost 80% of the accidents on the Tele2 networks in Moscow were due to theft.

Operators have not yet developed adequate measures to protect against theft at their sites. Somewhere video surveillance is installed, and someone makes regular patrols of their own networks with the help of a quadcopter.

Information about incidents immediately falls into the security service. The investigation begins, the search for criminals. Social networks, apparently, do not look particularly, but there often appear questionable ads for the sale of carrier equipment.
It is clear that the operators of methods of combating theft are similar. MegaFon noted that, as a rule, the circle of suspects is predetermined, and often these are employees of contract organizations.
MTS has developed a whole range of measures to protect infrastructure facilities. All base stations are under video surveillance. Access to the facilities of employees of contractors is strictly controlled.

In a way, the experience of combating the thefts of the operator “Corbina Telecom” can be called unique. The company has experienced similar problems with “Tele2”. As a result, the following measures were taken. All staff immediately warned about the disastrous consequences of theft. Secondly, for an anonymous denunciation of the thief, they offered a solid reward - 1 million rubles. The reward was given to buyers of such iron. The effectiveness of this approach made it known instantly.
According to a person who regularly cooperates with the Big Four operators, today's federal operators simply do not have such a clear strategy as the Corbina Telecom had.