FOUNTAIN VALLEY : Electrician Arrested on Phone Fraud Charges

Police arrested an unemployed electrician Wednesday with 100 stolen cellular phones and the computer equipment used to reprogram them with numbers stolen from unwitting cell phone users.

Michael Glenn Silliman, 40, was taken into custody at 7 a.m. after officers served a search warrant on his home, where he lived with his two children and his mother and stepfather. Investigators recovered the stolen cellular phones, software and other computer equipment used to program stolen account numbers into the phones, a practice known as cloning. They also found stolen corporate manuals detailing how to do the job.

Investigators for L.A. Cellular had honed in on Silliman and purchased two stolen cellular phones from him over the weekend, Lt. Bob Mosley said. Police then searched Silliman’s home.

Mosley said Silliman headed up his own operation, buying stolen phone numbers from others and programming them into stolen phones.

“This is the individual we were looking for, but there’s just an awful lot of them out there,” Mosley said.

Silliman was booked into the Huntington Beach City Jail on charges of possessing cloned phones, possession with intent to defraud and possession of stolen property, Mosley said.

Cellular phone carriers across North America project a 1995 loss of more than $500 million because of fraud involving cloned phones and stolen access numbers, said Jim Goode, the manager of fraud control at L.A. Cellular.

Silliman charged $250 for a cloned phone, with a 30-day guarantee because unwitting customers generally do not realize their phone accounts have been cloned until they get their bills. Corporate phones went for $500, with a 90-day guarantee because corporations generally take longer to review their phone records, Mosley said.

The arrest comes on the heels of “Operation Cybersnare,” a Secret Service operation that snagged a Huntington Beach man and five others across the country for cloning fraud.