A Basque police helicopter hovers near a television and mobile phone antenna
A Basque police helicopter hovers near a television and mobile phone antenna following a bomb attack near Hernani January 16, 2009. A small bomb planted in a television transmitter exploded in Spain's Basque country early on Friday, but caused no serious damage or injuries, police said. Reuters

An interesting and intriguing piece of information by Popular Science stated that nineteen mysterious mobile towers were found in New York City, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles.

These fake towers were discovered by heavily customised Android devices, but nobody knows who these towers belong to or who could be the possible owners.

The towers that were discovered are listening into the conversations of callers instead of providing service. These unsuspecting towers are capable of connecting to nearby phones by passing encryption and reading text messages and tapping calls. They are attacking mobile phones by installing spyware and eavesdropping.

Moreover, these towers are found near the U.S. military base. A leading American defence and law enforcement technology provider based in Las Vegas called ESD used CryptoPhone 500 to detect these 19 fake cellphone towers. This company sells Samsung Galaxy S3 that is equipped with enhanced encryption. Most phones are unable to detect these towers. But it did not go unnoticed by the CryptoPhone 500.

The CryptoPhone 500 is a customized Android device that is disguised as a Samsung Galaxy S3, but is highly encrypted. The CEO of ESD America Les Goldsmith said in an interview to Popular Science that these towers that were intercepting calls is much higher in number than people in the U.S. had anticipated. According to Goldsmith when one of their customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina he found eight different interceptors. They also found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.

These towers were noticed in July and by the look of it there could be many more. Well, nobody knows who it belonged to, but according to ESD they are found near the U.S. military base.

According to Goldsmith they are not sure whose interceptors are these and who are they? Why are they listening to calls around the military base? Is it the U.S. military or are these towers installed by foreign governments? He went on to add that they really don't know whose they are.

It may not belong to the NSA as this agency does not need false towers to tap and listen to anybody's call reported VentureBeat.

Andrew Jaquith from the cloud security firm SilverSky said that the NSA does not need fake towers they can go to the carriers to tap lines.

These towers also bring down the performance of the phone from 4G to 2G when the phone is intercepted.

The police department in select cities in the U.S. operate "Stingray or Hailstorm" towers to conduct surveillance on mobile phones by jamming phone signal and bringing the reception down from 4G to 3G network or to a more insecure network the 2G band.

The Cryptophone 500 uses secure software, that will tell if a phone is subjected to any band based attack tracing the location of the false tower.