June 28, 2006: Iraqi terrorists have hacked into wireless phone systems in southern Iraq, obtained the number that British soldiers were calling back home in Britain, and then made threatening calls to those numbers. The British troops were warned not to use their cell phones for calls home, but cell phone service has gotten a lot better, and cheaper, in Iraq during the last year. Unfortunately, the criminals were all over the new and improved cell phone system, and some of them got the idea of selling phone numbers to Iraqi terrorists. Only about two dozen of these threatening calls are known to have been made. British counter-terrorism forces have traced the calls back to phones in Iraq. The calls were made by people speaking broken English with a Middle Eastern accent. The message was usually along the lines of, "your boy will die in Iraq."
Iraqi police expect that they will now be getting some help from the British in a joint effort to attack cell phone crime in southern Iraq.
