WHITE PLAINS – Twelve people were arrested Wednesday on federal charges of participating in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud and aggravated identity theft for their roles in a $250 million cell phone cloning scheme.

Police agencies in Westchester County participated in the investigation – Yonkers Police, Village of Mount Pleasant Police, and Mount Vernon Police.

The defendants allegedly cloned the phones by emailing the phone numbers and associated codes to each other and then using the codes to reprogram new cell phones. The re-programmed phones appeared on the cell phone service providers’ networks as legitimate customer phones.

Those charged attached hundreds of cell phone clones to computers and used them to place international calls to Cuba, Jamaica and other countries with high calling rates. The calls were made using Voice Over Internet Protocol hardware, which enabled them to place international calls over cell phone clones from callers whose voices were transmitted to the co-conspirators’ computers over the Internet.

They allegedly profited from those international calls by selling the right to place them at rates below those charged by the legitimate telephone service providers.