Thieves in South Africa Hit Traffic Lights For SIM Cards

arisvega writes "Some 400 high-tech South African traffic lights are out of action after thieves in Johannesburg stole the mobile phone SIM cards they contain. JRA (Johannesburg Road Agency) said it is investigating the possibility of an 'inside job' after only the SIM card-fitted traffic lights were targeted. The cards were fitted to notify JRA when the traffic lights were faulty. 'We have 2,000 major intersections in Johannesburg and only 600 of those were fitted with the cards,' the agency's spokesperson Thulani Makhubela told the BBC. 'No-one apart from JRA and our supplier knows which intersections have that system.' The thieves ran up bills amounting to thousands of dollars by using the stolen cards to make calls."

Re:STO, really, again?

[nedlohs]

No that's the rational for suspecting an inside job and hence investigating that angle.

You would think it would be a no-brainer to have the SIM cards on some sort of custom phone plan which only allows calls to a fixed set of numbers, though.

Re:STO, really, again?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'm not sure why they were provisioned for voice at all. One would think that any fault reporting tasks could be more easily and cheaply handled as SMSes or GPRS transfers of a kb or two...

It isn't like there is a tiny little man in the control box who has to call when he is out of sandwiches or anything...