Your Phone Connects to Fake Cell Towers Daily — Here's How I Detect Them

Your phone will connect to the strongest tower it hears. It does not ask for ID first. It assumes trust, and that assumption is the entire problem. I first noticed this in 2019 outside a security conference in Las Vegas. My test Android dropped from LTE to 2G for 47 seconds, then returned to normal. No user notification. The baseband logs showed a cipher downgrade to A5/0, a location area code that did not exist in any public database, and a silent authentication request. I was running SnoopSnit