The police can trace your phone in under 60 seconds.

It's a Hollywood plot device as old as the Princess phone: The good guys receive a call from the kidnapper/mad bomber/drug lord, they need to string him along for 60 seconds to trace the call, but he's wise to their time constraint and hangs up just short of the one-minute mark.

While it may have made Jack Bauer sweat bullets on "24," the old 60-second rule is strictly firing blanks today.

"In the digital age, it's immediate," says private investigator Gary Tuttle of Assured Investigations in Atlanta. "As soon as the call is placed, it can be tracked and traced to where it is being originated."

An FBI agent who spoke on condition of anonymity agrees: "If someone is calling from a landline, the carrier will know immediately. They can't hide it from the phone company. It may come up on your phone as unavailable, but the phone company knows exactly where it's coming from," she says.

These days, if you really want to give our 60-minute man Jack Bauer the runaround, give your bad guy a stolen cell phone, or better yet, a one-time-use "drop phone" available at your nearest Walmart and put him on the road.

"When the number isn't associated with the person we're looking for, we have to triangulate their position off of cell phone towers," says our FBI agent. "If they're not moving, we can be down to one house away from where they are, and when it comes down to that, we can surround a neighborhood and go door to door to find the person we're looking for."

Link:
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/can-police-trace-60-second-phone-call-1282.php