All they have these old cell phones, with actual buttons and all, no smart phones what so ever. Are those old phones harder to track or whats going on?
In Vino Veritas.
They are cheap and therefore good for one time use
shareThey usually cost around 20 euros with 10 euros credit.
shareNot sure, but in my idea they use them because smartphones are easely tracked by the police than older phones, with all the gps locations and privacy problems on more recent phones
shareThey do the job and are really cheap so you can throw them away when done.
shareIndeed, as mentioned above, older cell phones (especially old simple models of Nokia phones from the 20th century) are very difficult to track or tap by police.
The smartphones nowadays with wifi, bluetooth, NFC, GPS, and what not, are in comparison very easy to be intercepted or tracked. On a modern smartphone there hardly is anything left like privacy, I don't mind, but for criminals it's a greater risk (everything mainly over internet being linked to your personal information and accounts (e-mail, facebook, playstore, updates), ip and mac-adresses, imei number, tracking through gps or cell towers). This also explains the use of disposable phones by criminals with pre-paid services only, so no sort of contract is required.
They are cheap, difficult to track because lack of GPS.
Also a very important note is that if you have a smart phone, even though you're phone is off, the police still can triangulate and find you because the batteri is active.
In the modern smart phones you can not remove the batteri, but you can in the old phones, hence no tracking at all.