When a confidential informant working for the Ottawa County Drug Task Force needed to set up a drug buy last summer, he started texting and calling people he knew were into drugs.
A few hours later, he was driving to a public parking lot in the Port Clinton area where a dealer had texted him and told him to meet her.
He handed her some cash upfront, which she took to Toledo and used to buy heroin. A couple of hours later, she texted the informant with instructions to meet her at another public parking lot, where she handed him the heroin.
This is a typical drug buy, said Carl Rider, Ottawa County Drug Task Force agent. There's one tool that helped it all come together: cellphones.
Of the technology available for dealers to use, cellphones are most commonly used in the trade, law enforcement officials and defense attorneys said.
They give drug users instantaneous communication with dealers. And they're difficult, if not impossible, to trace.
Many dealers use pre-paid, disposable cellphones — commonly called burn phones — and constantly change numbers to keep from getting caught, law enforcement officials said.
"It's a lot easier to get untraceable phones than it was 10 years ago," said Lt. Paul Cortwright, commander of the Central Ohio Drug Enforcement Task Force, which includes Coshocton, Muskingum and Licking counties.
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People can buy them for as low as $10 at many common retailers and can pay to add minutes to them. Rider said he was not aware of any efforts to ban prepaid phones and said plenty of people use them legitimately.
Because the phones are disposable and often paid for with cash, there is no monthly bill or record of subscriber information, including incoming and outgoing calls, Rider said. With a regular phone plan, agents normally can subpoena that information.
"Bigger dealers will have a half a dozen of these phones at one time," Rider said. "The people that they trust are going to know when they switch numbers. They're not stupid."
Some dealers also will have other people open cellphone accounts and then turn the phone over to the dealer to use, said Jeff Orr, Trumbull-Ashtabula Group Task Force commander.
And others use a regular cellphone plan with a smartphone, said Mansfield police Chief Ken Coontz, who leads the METRICH Enforcement Unit, which covers nine counties north of Columbus.
Company privacy policies have made it more difficult for law enforcement to get information from a suspect's phone, even with a warrant, Coontz said. Often, authorities need the phone owner's security code or password to get into the phone, he said.
But there are some software tools that help law enforcement get into those phones, said Coontz, who declined to elaborate.
Although the drug trade can be a complicated web of supply and demand, simply using cellphones and word of mouth to sell the product tends to be common practice, said defense attorney John Thebes, of Toledo.
Other technology is used to a lesser extent.
Some dealers use social media and email to peddle drugs, Orr said. Generally, they talk in code and don't specifically say what they're doing, he said.
"If it's consistent, we're able to figure it out," Orr said.
Outside computers, dealers sometimes use Western Union and other agencies that wire money to pay for drugs from suppliers in other states, Rider said.
"They'll use bogus names and bogus IDs," he said. "They're required to show IDs, so they'll use fake ones."
Gannett Ohio's Jessie Balmert contributed to this report.
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