IP: Illegal Phone Access Sold on the Street (from Telecom

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

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]