MYSTERIOUS fake mobile phone towers have been found across America. Nobody knows who owns them and they’re listening in on unsuspecting users.

They look identical to any other mobile phone mast and you wouldn’t think twice they could be for anything other than providing a good signal, except seventeen 17 towers were discovered after it was found data was being leaked from owners’ handsets.

HOW TO MAKE SURE YOUR PHONE IS SAFE

A report by privacy website welivesecurity claims the fake towers are dotted across the country and have been found to attack mobile phones through eavesdropping and installing spyware without owners knowing. They were found by people using a specialised Android device known as the CrytoPhone 500, which uses a secure version of the software that can detect if their phone is subject to a “baseband attack”.

The leaks led them to the mysterious towers and the article describes how a road trip from Florida to North Carolina “found eight different interceptors”. It’s understood these towers can intercept voice calls and texts as well as allow voice manipulation, modification, and calling and sending texts on behalf of the user. They can also find the location of a user through random call monitoring.

Not only can your average mobile phone not detect if anything malicious has happened to it, but it’s also a lot more vulnerable to attacks. It’s a scary thought, but even scarier is how nobody knows who built or runs the towers. It’s believed the technology is beyond that of average hackers but one clue has found a relation to the location of the fake towers being next to US military bases.