[fa.telecom] TELECOM Digest V5 #2

telecom@ucbvax.ARPA (07/05/85)

From: Moderator <Telecom-REQUEST@MIT-XX.ARPA>

TELECOM Digest                          Thursday, July 4, 1985 11:39PM
Volume 5, Issue 2

Today's Topics:

                         new archive created
                         Tricks of the trade.
                 Update on telephone harrassment case

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Date: Tue 2 Jul 85 19:23:27-EDT
From: Jon Solomon <JSOL@MIT-XX.ARPA>
Subject: new archive created

PS:<TELECOM>VOLUME-4.TXT is this past year's TELECOM digests. They
join the archive as of the previous issue (which is volume 5, Issue 1).

TELECOM.RECENT will continue to be maintained at MIT-XX until
further notice.

SRI-CSL is in the process of updating its Tenex system to a
FOONLY F4 running TOPS-20. That host is on address [128.18.0.254],
but according to the NIC table, connecting to SRI-CSL will yeild
the tenex system, so be sure to use the address and not the name.
This will continue to be valid until further notice.

Enjoy,
--JSol

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Subject: Tricks of the trade.
Date: 03 Jul 85 06:15:52 EDT (Wed)
From: Henry N. Holtzman <holtzman@mit-charon.ARPA>


Try this one on for size:

The other day I dialed 0 from a New England Telephone centrex phone with
least cost routing. I asked "What is the area code for Smithtown, LI?"  The
reply was 10288516.  What a hack!

-Hank

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Date: Thu, 4 Jul 85 21:12:01 MDT
From: donn@utah-cs (Donn Seeley)
Subject: Update on telephone harrassment case

I want to thank all the people who sent mail to me in response to my
original posting on the subject.  I tried to give personal replies to
each message, but in the end the volume was simply overwhelming, so I
hope you'll accept this note as a heartfelt 'thank you'.

My friend's telephone harrassment has stopped, but his problems are not
yet over.  Pacific Bell still maintains that he placed all of the calls
on his bill and wants him to pay up immediately.  He has paid for
everything except the last several months of charges for '976-Service'
calls.  Pacific Bell's '976-Service' lets a company furnish a recording
which is played when a number in the 976 'exchange' is dialed; in
addition to the usual toll charges on a call to one of these numbers, a
separate per-call additional charge is made, part of which goes to the
company.  This per-call charge varies from $0.50 for calls to
dial-a-soap or horoscopes to $2.00 for dial-a-porn.  My friend is
refusing to pay for some $300 in charges for calls to 976 numbers,
involving some hundreds of calls over a period of several months.  (The
total amount of bogus charges for 976 calls appears to be around $425,
counting 976 calls which were paid for before my friend recognized the
nature of the problem.)

My friend would like to get advice on how to to put together a petition
to the PUC, so that he can at least prevent Pacific Bell from taking
action until the dispute over phreaking has been settled.  Pacific Bell
claims that they are prepared to destroy my friend's credit rating
(curiously, the same threat was made by the harrassing phone callers),
and has said that they will cut off his phone service soon, so my
friend wants to move quickly.  My friend would also like information on
how best to persuade the PUC to examine his case and resolve the issue
over the charges completely.  (If you think another arena would be more
appropriate, we're open to suggestions.) If you have experience in this
area, we'd sure like to hear from you.

My friend and I feel that the case will be more persuasive if we can
document previous cases of phreaking, particularly cases which affected
Pacific Bell.  If you have any leads on articles or papers which
discuss phreaking, we'd sure appreciate it if you could send us
pointers to them, and if you have any personal experiences with
problems of this kind, we'd be interested in hearing about that too.

My friend has seen a copy of the original article I posted, and I've
received some feedback on it from him.  There are a few minor
inaccuracies or omissions in the article which I can correct.  My
friend says that his son didn't get onto a phreak bboard; the abuse is
probably coming from acquaintances of the son at his high school (which
is in a high-tech area and has many students whose parents work in the
electronics industry).  The police were indeed called in to handle the
abusive phone calls, and a policeman was actually on the line when a
couple of these calls came in.  The calls stopped immediately after
this, however...  My friend believes he understands how his
long-distance access code was stolen -- he thinks that someone may have
knocked at the front door and asked to use the phone, and this person
dug through the papers around the phone and uncovered the access code.
(Needless to say, my friend no longer keeps his access code written
down in an insecure place...) Not all of the unfamiliar numbers which
appeared on my friend's bills were 976 numbers, at least at first.
(All or virtually all of the unfamiliar numbers since the time the
abusive calls stopped have been these 976 numbers, however.) For
example, my friend was charged for 25 calls to the west coast consulate
of the USSR over three months, as well as one long distance call to the
military attache at the Russian embassy in Washington, DC.  (Don't ask
me what business the phreaks had with the Russians...) Many of the
numbers that were called are apparently unlisted; some of them may
actually be numbers internal to Pacific Bell facilities, although my
friend can't be sure because Pacific Bell won't discuss them.  (Pacific
Bell also refused to disclose the identities of the companies that ran
the 976 numbers my friend was charged for, until a recent PUC decision
forced them to do so.) My friend has found that a number of the abusive
calls he received were billed to his own long distance access code.
When he investigated some of the unfamiliar numbers on his long
distance bill he found some people who had also received abusive
calls.  (The harrassers used other methods to get at my friend; for
example they would call companies and misrepresent themselves as my
friend, ordering services which my friend didn't want or need, and on
at least one occasion they made a collect obscene phone call by giving
the operator the name of someone known to the family...) The total bill
for all the calls combined never reached a thousand dollars, but it
certainly was several hundred dollars; part of that bill was forgiven
by the long distance service (unfortunately Pacific Bell has not been
so magnanimous).  If I remember any more mistakes my friend found, I'll
mention them in the next message...

My friend was very glad to see the pile of messages from the net which
I sent him, and I hope that I'll have more to give him soon...  Many of
the messages simply expressed support; a number of them made practical
suggestions about how to fight phreaks and communicate with the phone
company, and my friend is looking into a number of the avenues that
were proposed.  A couple responses seemed rather negative -- I was
surprised to see that some people felt that my friend deserved the
treatment he got, either because he was naive about the potential for
telephone abuse and hence was 'asking for it', or because the son had
somehow betrayed the phreaks and required punishment for being
dishonest.  I'm not sympathetic to these attitudes and by the number of
positive responses, neither are the bulk of news readers...

Thanks again for the help,

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn

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End of TELECOM Digest
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