REAL wire tapping BY citizens?

Without giving too much information about myself, I have evidence that an individual is tapping into cell phone conversations of a friend of mine.

Govt conspiracies aside - Is this possible by a civilian layperson? The individual is not in govt or law enforcement. He may have contacts within those arenas, but not so close (ie-close friend/family) that I would think that they would risk their careers to help the guy out. And he is of relatively modest means, so he would be limited in his ability to "buy" the equipment/info/loyalty.

I suggested that maybe he simply obtained her PIN for her voicemail, email or online bills. But the level of knowledge that my friend describes indicates that he is actually listing in on calls. Is there technology available out there to enable a non-technical person to do this?

Back in the day a neat trick with motorola 9122 "brick" phones was to ground pin 7 and hold down a couple of keys to enter debug mode. From there you could unmute the speaker, set it to receive, and scan all the cell freqs in the area, listening in on conversations, and basically turning it into a scanner. If you wanted to listen in on a call someone was making you'd set up the phone to scan, and just keep incrementing channels till you recognized the voice or call content.

You could buy a scanner and a DTMF decoder from several different sources, put the two together, and decode all the keypresses, stealing a mailbox password. With a bit of extra effort, you could also get ESN/NAM info to display as well as keyprsses if you can have the scanner catch the first bits of data sent.

I haven't had a cellphone for years, so there's probably a different method for digital gsm or whatever they use now, but i'd be willing to bet it'd still be do-able with off the shelf hardware and a bit of patience.

Cant people modify police scanners to pick up cell phones? I know with my scanner I can pick up wireless phones, not cell phones.

someones got a stalker...hahaha anyway i dont know crap about wire tapping but thats kinda scary

Digital cell phones are encrypted. If he's using an analog cell phone you can listen in.

You can actually break digital cell phone encryption given time and knowledge but not in real time, unless you've got a lot of equipment and can catch the call setup sequence in action.

By a civilian layperson on a digital phone - no.