Two northern California public safety comm centers were flooded with 911 calls earlier this month, probably from telematics gear registered to an automotive company. The Palo Alto and California Highway Patrol (CHP) centers received the calls from an unsubscribed cellular phone or device, Charles Cullen, technical services director for Palo Alto police. He said dispatchers fielded 566 calls over two hours starting at 8:30 p.m., and all the calls were silent. The four on-duty dispatchers were kept busy handling the calls, but the calls did not disrupt operations. Dispatchers traced the calls to a Verizon account assigned to Continental Automotive Group, which makes in-car information, communications and entertainment systems. Cullen says he requested Verizon to block the electronic serial number (ESN) of the phone or device that made the calls, and he’s now investigating how and why they were made. The CHP received about 1,000 similar calls on Wednesday, Cullen said, also from an unregistered cellular phone. Read more about the 911 calls here., and watch a news video after the break.
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We had a similar incident last week. A Mercedes was involved in a property damage MVA and we recieved a call from the driver. The car continued to call us about every 5 minutes for over 4 hours. We actually had to get the police that handled the accident to get us the address of the driver. We sent the State Ppolice to that address (in an adjoining county) and had them have the owner disconnect the battery of the car. It also was associated with Continental Automotive Group. We got that information from Verizon.
Our local PD had a similar incident years ago, but the calls went on for weeks. We finally were able to trace the calls to a wireless carrier’s satellite which revealed the calls were coming from Pakistan. It was a nightmare to get them stopped. Scary to think that emergency systems can be so easily overwhelmed.
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