Also, a phone bill is only going to give you evidence of billable activity. A call that lasts one minute and one second will show as two minutes on a phone bill. This means that a phone call that lasts 15 seconds would show 1 minute on a phone bill.

These records are known as call detail records and they are different from phone bills.Ī phone bill is only accurate to the minute since the majority of wireless phone companies bill to the next full minute. In the many investigations we perform, the cell phone device is missing for myriad reasons, leaving any evidence of phone usage to be gleaned from the wireless phone company records. At the end of the day, it is incoming and outgoing data (like loading a webpage or YouTube video) and not actually a text message. Because of these alternative systems, cell phone companies don’t actually have information on these messages. It is what Apple to Apple devices use and it falls back to SMS if iMessage isn’t available. iMessage, for example, uses end-to-end encryption and a data/WiFi connection to send and receive instead of SMS. However, not all messages are what cell phone companies consider text messages. To get the contents, a request must be made to the cell phone company within days of the incident. Text messaging is also shown in the call detail records, however, the content of the messages are not. The cell tower, and therefore location, is only available upon request for each connected phone call. Text message meta data is also attainable, but the actual contents of the messages are not in the CDRs.Īdditionally, a call detail record will provide all call attempts whether they connected or not. Cell phone records, otherwise known as “Call Detail Records”, show the caller’s phone number, duration of call, start and end time of the call, and the cell phone tower the phone was connected to.

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