2600 Flash
Bell Credit Card Abuse Soars
Huge phone bills are being sent to innocent people all over the country. So huge, in fact, that they can't be sent in envelopes - they come in boxes. In the past month and a half, this scene has begun to proliferate.
As predicted on these pages in February, the AT&T Death Star cards are creating all kinds of problems. All that anyone has to do is glance at one of them to obtain a valid AT&T code. And that's exactly what people are doing. Some of these folks are, in fact, so organized that the codes are used for practically 24-hours-a-day, with new calls starting as often as three times a minute from all different parts of the country. It's rapidly becoming one of the easiest ways to make free phone calls, and best of all, it's through an old friend: Ma Bell!
While AT&T has put itself in a rather vulnerable position, they are not completely without defense. Any time that a credit card call is placed, the number that the call is being placed from is recorded and sent to the customer. Most phreaks know enough not to do this kind of thing from their home or local payphone.
Meanwhile, there is a major crackdown underway in Las Vegas concerning unauthorized use of MCI, Sprint, and ITT (AT&T is rumored to also be involved here). It seems that hundreds of people in that gambling town were passing codes around. The FBI claims that the persons involved are not phone phreaks, but that phreakers and hackers may have been hired to do the actual code-finding.
Electronics Create Portable Prisons
Cesario Romero, a 23-year-old New Mexico truck driver, recently served a 30-day sentence for disobeying a police officer. He never had to leave his home.
Romero was confined at home by a plastic box the size of a cigarette package that was strapped to his ankle. This device emits radio signals which would have informed the authorities if Romero strayed more than 150 feet from his telephone. The anklet emits a radio signal every 30 to 90 seconds which is picked up by a small receiver connected to the telephone outlet in the wearer's home. The receiver relays the signal to a computer that is monitored by the authorities. The printouts indicate each time the wearer exceeds the 150-foot limit and each time he tries to remove the anklet or unplug the receiver.
District Attorney Steven Schiff of the Second Judicial District said, "For someone like a first-time shoplifter, it could be used as a mild punishment, requiring the person to stay home nights and weekends for a specified time."
The U.S. Justice Department has expressed an interest in this monitoring system.
414's Plead Guilty
Two young men, both members of The 414 computer enthusiasts group, pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges on March 16.
Gerald Wondra of West Allis, WI and Timothy D. Winslow of Milwaukee, WI, both 21, broke into large computers in the U.S. and Canada last June, simply to prove that they could do it. The two agreed to plead guilty to two counts each of making harassing telephone calls, which is the most they can be charged with, since the government has no law against computer crimes. Each count carries a maximum penalty of six months in jail and a $500 fine.
The computers involved were located at: Security Pacific National Bank in Los Angeles, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Canada Cement LaFarge, Inc. in Vancouver, BC, and Citadel Industries, a New Jersey corporation.
Teller Machine Crime Coming
The Justice Department says that automated teller machines and other means of electronic financial transactions are "potentially fertile for criminal abuse."
Techniques for robbing the systems already have cropped up and are expected to increase. They range from the dynamiting of an automatic teller device to the withdrawal of funds by a cardholder who then claims no knowledge of the transaction. Because of an absence of sophisticated verification procedures in today's automated teller systems, such as fingerprints or voiceprints, the door is wide open to unscrupulous cardholders committing fraud from their very own accounts. (Some machines, though, take a picture of the person as soon as he takes the cash.)
Even though bank officials may be skeptical of a cardholder's disclaiming any knowledge of a withdrawal that had been made from his or her account, federal law makes it difficult for the officials to reject such a claim. If a bogus loss is reported within two business days, the law makes the cardholder responsible for only the first $50.
Free Information in Trouble
According to company spokesman Pic Wagner, AT&T is probably going to propose a 50-cent fee for long-distance information calls instead of the 75-cent fee it proposed last fall. Consumers currently don't pay anything for long-distance or overseas directory assistance.
A Word on Wiretapping
A recent article by Lenny Siegel, director of the Pacific Studies Center in Mountain View, CA, dealt with the subject of wiretapping.
In this article, Siegel says, "Present law outlaws 'aural' (voice) wiretapping, the monitoring of telephone conversations, without judicial approval, but 'nonaural' surveillance is legal. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can and do record telephone dialing information - who's calling whom - and digital data transmissions - messages between computers and other electronic devices. In fact, the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, warns that existing legislation may permit listening in on the growing percentage of voice transmissions that have been converted to digital pulses within the telephone network."