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IP: Illegal Phone Access Sold on the Street (from Telecom
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Sat, 28 Sep 1996 12:57:00 -0400
Seems to me that the use of encrypted last mile access via cable or adsl may become more attractive for city folk djf Subject: Illegal Phone Access Sold on the Street Date: Sun, 22 Sep 1996 18:18:27 PDT From: tad () ssc com Hackers Sell Illegal Phone Access On The Street LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Hackers are breaking into telephone line boxes and tapping dial tones belonging to businesses and homes, selling access on the street using a special hand-held receiver. Victims sometimes find their lines tied up for hours and receive bills for tens of thousands of dollars in fraudulent calls. The practice emerged early this year. Authorities believe several million dollars in illegal calls have been rung up since January. The Los Angeles area, with its huge immigrant population, has been a particularly fertile area for the phone fraud. The scammers have a ready population of customers looking to make cheap overseas calls. Six people caught in the act have been arrested for phone-line hacking this year in Los Angeles, Burbank, Montebello, San Francisco and Toronto, said Patsy Ramos, manager of Pacific Bell's centralized fraud bureau. As many as 15 incidents a week are now reported in California alone, Pacific Bell said. One non-profit group victimized received bills for more than $30,000 in calls to South and Central America, Europe and Egypt. The highly skilled scam artists typically are former phone company employees or others with extensive knowledge of telephones, investigators say. They target so-called "b-boxes" that serve as junctions for the phone lines of hundreds of homes and businesses in a neighborhood. The hackers open the 4-foot-tall gray boxes on the sidewalk and clip onto the phone lines with special tools, diverting a dial tone into a hand-held receiver from which customers can make calls. In a more sophisticated version, the hackers forward a dial tone to a nearby pay phone, where customers line up to make calls for a fee of $5 to $20. The thieves attract customers by passing out fliers and through word-of-mouth. The Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles was hit June 15 when thieves broke into a nearby box and forwarded lines from its offices to several pay phones. Long distance and international calls totaling $11,000 were billed to the organization. Executive Director Juanita Tate said she suspected something was fishy when the 14 lines on her telephone system were tied up almost the entire day. "You would push a button and you'd hear somebody trying to dial a number and then you'd push another button and there would be a voice asking for somebody you never heard of," Tate said. Phone company officials tried to secure the box, but the bandits struck again two months later, running up nearly $20,000 in calls to places such as Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru, Guyana and Honduras. "We're taking this very seriously right now and putting a lot of focus on the prevention end -- trying to secure the boxes," Ramos said. But there is currently no sure-fire way the companies can detect or prevent the crime. AT&T said it will credit victims for the fraudulent calls, but the cases must be verified by a local phone company whose equipment is being tapped. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: So they are finally waking up to what was discussed in this Digest starting several years ago; that in any large, older urban/inner-city area, access to the phone lines of everyone on your block is often times as easy as getting access to the basement of an older high-rise building and patiently sorting through the wires and noting how they terminate in the head -- the big box mounted on the wall, as often as not with no cover on it, or certainly no *locked* cover -- and reading the cryptic notes written on little tags tied with string on some of the wires running in all directions. The cable serving the building serves quite a few other buildings in the area as often as not, and when it was installed many, many years ago the wires in the cable were 'multipled'; that is, they were opened at several locations along the cable-run allowing the same pair of wires to be used at one place for awhile then at some other place for awhile. That was certainly more economical than running two or three physical wire pairs all the way from the CO to every single possible place a phone might be installed, but I guess it did not occur to telco back then that someday people might be more sophisticated in the way telephone systems work. Certainly back in the days of stepper and crossbar central office switches telco did not think fraud would ever reach the point that the whole thing had to be junked and rebuilt from scratch using ESS (fraud was not the only reason for developing ESS but was a big consideration). Now I guess they need to think seriously about the vulnerabilities of the outside plant. To read what was said about this topic several years ago in this Digest, check the archives for the file 'find-pair'. PAT]
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