If you want to avoid being captured, overflowing your location and all other sensitive details, then a smartphone will be a nightmare. Presumably, this is why Ghislaine Maxwell tried to cover his footprints by wrapping the phone in tin foil, which is equivalent to carrying a mobile phone jammer with him. This is not the work of a technical genius.
Prosecutors in the Maxwell case claimed that “when the agents conducted a security raid on the house, they also noticed a mobile phone wrapped in tin foil on the table. This appeared to be a misleading effort to evade detection.”
Why use aluminum foil to wrap the phone? It can only be speculated that Maxwell tried to create a DIY Faraday Cage, using metal foil to deflect the signal so that the phone could not be tracked.
Sadly, it doesn't work. Although wrapping the phone in aluminum foil is almost certain to cause a certain degree of interference, it may not be enough to prevent the phone from sending and receiving signals. If you really want to cut off the signal completely, it is recommended to use a cell phone jammer to interrupt it. Indeed, the 2016 video embedded below shows an amateur detective proving that tin foil-even the layers of things wrapped around the receiver-will not prevent it from answering the phone. The same is true for today's mobile phones. I repeated the experiment this afternoon with the Samsung Galaxy S9 wrapped in my own tin foil. My phone is connected.
The most likely effect of wrapping the phone in aluminum foil is that you will burn the battery faster because it is difficult for the phone to capture signals and cannot dissipate heat. Eventually it will cause the phone’s battery to run out and shut down-this is the most effective way to prevent anyone from tracking the phone.
Why doesn't Maxwell simply turn off what she doesn't want to be tracked? The mind is deadlocked. Maybe she doesn't want to wait 30 seconds or so, so when you turn on the phone for the first time, it needs to be ready to use. That being the case, she doesn't need tin foil to tap the phone's radio, but in the past ten years or more, every smart phone has built-in a simple function-airplane mode.
Airplane mode disables all radios in the phone, which means that the phone will not always ping the local cell phone tower, nor will it provide the authorities with any clues about its location. To be fair, the lives of smartphone manufacturers have become more difficult in recent years. So far, the biggest obstacle that has not been discovered is that the battery is now usually sealed in a box to prevent the battery from being secretly removed to ensure that it cannot be traced during the journey. Maxwell may even suspect that the phone has been tapped to some extent, so even if she turns off the phone or puts it in airplane mode, the phone will still find out her location.
As any Breaking Bad fan knows, this is why criminals often rely on cheap phones like "burner phones" that can be discarded after a few days, making it impossible for law enforcement to track specific numbers or phones for a long time. There is a possibility that the signal transmission is blocked by a mobile phone jammer.
Maybe Maxwell is so enthusiastic about her smartphone that nothing is as cheap and annoying as a recorder. In this case, she may best spend the alleged millions of dollars on a suitable RF shielding bag, such as the so-called Faraday Bag, which claims to be able to block all cellular networks and Wi-Fi signals. She may just have found a difficult way. If you are trying to avoid detection, then choosing a cheaper option will not help.
