Used mobile phone market is a criminals' playground

MOBILE PHONE USERS have been warned not to sell their old handsets to complete strangers without first wiping their content.

The warning, which sounds about as unnecessary as warning people not to leave the house without first putting on their trousers, comes from the life assistance *cough* insurance firm CPP, which added that over half of all second hand mobile phones contained "extensive" personal data.

This data, it added, often ends up in the hands of "complete strangers" who presumably can't wait to get their mysterious grubby mitts on second hand photos of people's cats and their exciting dialogue about who was "still on the train" and when.

CPP was commissioned by Cryptocard, a firm that offers security for devices including mobile phones, to carry out an experimental shopping spree on Ebay and other secondhand websites. The result of the spending frenzy was a collection of seondhand phones and SIM cards, which CPP then turned its beady eye on.

Data found on the handsets and SIMs included credit and debit card PIN numbers, bank account details, passwords, company information, log-ins for social notworking websites, and horror upon horror, phone numbers.

CPP also carried out some research to go along with its voyeuristic experiment and found that half of secondhand mobile phone owners had found personal information on them.

Bizarrely, 81 per cent of respondents also claimed that they wiped their phones before selling them, which suggests that CPP either changed its sample pool halfway through questioning or that people don't know how to wipe a mobile phone.

CPP said that more likely people had believed that erasing data manually was enough to wipe their information wholesale, but it suggested that this was far from the case.

CPP had a Cryptocard spokesman available to make a comment about this, but let's face it, we can all work out what he was going to say. Instead, we can turn to CPP's mobile data expert, Danny Harrison, who said, "This report is a shocking wake up call and shows how mobile phones can inadvertently cause people to be careless with their personal data...

"If [people] do sell or recycle them online or even give them to friends and family, they need to ensure they remove all their personal information thoroughly and consider the serious consequences of not doing so."

We probably could have dropped the "a" and cut the quote off at 'shocking', but no one asked us. µ