Pre-paid phones - traceable?

The case of the missing (now found alive, thank you Jesus!) Guy family from Indiana was apparently solved by tracking a pre-paid cell phone.
Question - how is this done? Do they ping like regular phones? Would they have had to purchase the phone with a credit card to be found out? OR if they called someone on the phone who saved the #, would having the # on the phone make it traceable?
Full disclosure: I am GREAT with medical technology, not so great with the rest of it.:waitasec:

marycarney said:

The case of the missing (now found alive, thank you Jesus!) Guy family from Indiana was apparently solved by tracking a pre-paid cell phone.
Question - how is this done? Do they ping like regular phones? Would they have had to purchase the phone with a credit card to be found out? OR if they called someone on the phone who saved the #, would having the # on the phone make it traceable?
Full disclosure: I am GREAT with medical technology, not so great with the rest of it.:waitasec:

Click to expand...

This was true about 10 years ago, when shortly after 9/11 the authorities arrested several suspected Muslim terrorists after they purchased several prepaid cell phones at once. The reason they bought so many was because they could be used for so many minutes before they needed to be activated. This was back when there were still analog phones as well.

Nowadays, everything is digital, and as such I have not heard of any commercial cell phone or wireless technology that can be used without full activation, which presumably includes subscriber information and validation. Now, I'm not discounting identity thieves from being able to disguise their own illicit usage of digital technology, but as far as I know, there is no conventional method in which to activate a cell phone so its subscriber information is not present.