Telecom-Request%mit-mc@brl-bmd.UUCP (Telecom-Request@mit-mc) (03/16/84)
TELECOM Digest Friday, 16 Mar 1984 Volume 4 : Issue 35
Today's Topics:
My Experience with LMS
"Too large, too heavy, to send through the mail."
Re: station equipment, intellectual property, etc.
Re: Fire Prevention
Bell's National Security Group In Operation
Mrs. Landenberger wasn't the only one in NY to get zapped.
AC Power vs. step by step
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Date: Mon, 12 Mar 84 11:36:59 EST
From: "John W. Kinch (VLD/REB)" <kinch@brl-voc>
Subject: My Experience with LMS
I live by myself, am home little and use the telephone at home only
for a few calls, so I decided to try Local Measured Service when it
was offered here in C&P land. I opted for the service in which one
pays a charge for the dial tone and all calls are charged at .035 for
the first minute and at .015 for subsequent minutes. I was assured
that calls prefixed by 1 or 0 (long distance) or to certain exchanges
(TPC for example) would not be charged as local calls. I was also
assured that not just a count of the calls would be made, i.e. answer
supervision would be available to the local equipment.
I received my first bill last week and was rather surprised. By my
records which were kept quite carefully, I made 24 calls during the
billing period. I did not time each call, just made a record of each
call made. I was billed for 36 calls!. I was also billed for 26
additional minutes which is reasonable. I have talked to TPC billing
about this and got nowhere. My exchange (301-728) was installed in
the early 60's as a replacement for the old MADison exchange which was
the last cordboard exchange in Baltimore City. From this date and the
fact that I know it is not an ESS exchange, I assume it is a #5
Crossbar. Does anyone have any idea what kind of equipment is
available for installation in this kind of exchange to provide LMS?
>From the numbers above, it seems likely that I am being charged for
all calls to all points and whether they are answered or not, but I
can't prove it now. I am keeping much more careful records this
month.
Since we are allowed to try LMS for four months at no charge for
change in service class or for a change to another class during that
time, I though it would be an interesting experiment. If anyone has
any ideas on this matter I would be interested in hearing them.
------------------------------
Date: 12 Mar 1984 10:14-PST
Sender: GEOFF@SRI-CSL
Subject: "Too large, too heavy, to send through the mail."
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff @ SRI-CSL>
n084 1827 11 Mar 84 BC-PHONE Woman Gets a $109,505.86 Phone Bill By
ROBERT D. McFADDEN c. 1984 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - For weeks, Jane Landenberger had been receiving unusual
telephone calls in her Bedford, N.Y., home. Then, last Monday, she got
the oddest call of all - she was talking on the phone with a friend
when an operator broke in to say that the telephone company was trying
to reach her, and that it was urgent.
''It was a supervisor - a Mrs. Gackstatter in the business office
in White Plains,'' Mrs. Landenberger recalled Sunday. ''She wanted to
talk to me about my February phone bill. She said, 'It is excessive.'
''
''I was a little flip,'' Mrs. Landenberger said. ''I said: 'It was
excessive last month, too. How excessive is it?'
''She said, 'It is $109,505.86.' ''
As if that wasn't enough, Mrs. Landenberger said, she was told
that ''the bill was too large - too heavy - to send through the mail,
so they were going to send it by United Parcel Service.''
''I thought, Oh, my God. This is something else!''
The next day, a UPS truck delivered the bill - all 2,578 pages of
it, wrapped in five elastic-bound bundles that were nearly too heavy
to lift. The bill recorded about 15,000 calls to and from Europe,
South America, Africa, the Far East and points across the United
States.
All had been charged to Mrs. Landenberger's telephone credit card
- the one she cuts up each year so it will not be lost or stolen - in
what New York Telephone Co. security officials Sunday called one of
the biggest frauds of its kind ever.
It was done, apparently, by a host of people - no one knows yet
how many - all of whom had to have known both Mrs. Landenberger's home
telephone number and her telephone credit card number. How the call
thieves got the numbers is unclear.
An investigation is under way to catch the culprits, who may have
been involved in anything from college pranks to multi-million-dollar
drug deals. But the malefactors' bogus credit has at least been cut
off.
Telephone company officials have issued a new credit card to the
dazed Mrs. Landenberger.
And to ease the shock of her bill somewhat, they have issued her a
credit for $109,457.83, leaving a balance to be paid of $47.03, the
total for her legitimate calls last month.
Still, the experience has left her a little unnerved.
''I have a feeling my phone number is up in every rest room from
here to California,'' she said Sunday, as she leafed through the
stacks and stacks of charges.
''Here's a four-hour call from Miami to Caracas for $200,'' she
said. ''There are lots of calls to South America. There are calls to
Libya, Nigeria, England, Italy, France, Alaska, the Philippines.
They're from the United States mostly, the great majority of them from
the Miami area.''
The strange tale of Jane Landenberger's telephone bill began last
January, she said, when more than $300 in excess charges appeared.
''I called the company,'' she said. ''They were very nice about
it. They called me back and said they had credited the $300 to my
account.''
Then, early in February, the weird telephone calls began coming in
at all hours of the day and night, leaving Mrs. Landenberger sleepless
and puzzled. Some of the calls, she said, were placed by ''a man with
a foreign-sounding voice.''
''He would ask for Magdeline or Sandra or Teresa or he would say
'Who is this?' '' she said Sunday. ''One night there were 19 calls. I
got no sleep at all. I believe they were long-distance calls because
the connection was kind of crinkly.
''I also began getting calls from telephone operators asking
authority for third-party calls from Miami to Haiti, or Cincinnati to
Mexico or Quebec to the United Kingdom. Of course I always refused
permission, but that apparently didn't stop them.''
To stop the mysterious calls, Mrs. Landenberger eventually used a
ruse suggested by telephone company security officials. The last time
the stranger called, she flashed the operator and said - so that the
caller could hear - ''Please trace this call.''
''That ended my receiving any more crazy calls, but apparently
they were still charging calls to my account through February,'' she
said.
A telephone company spokesman, Lon Braithwaite, said that a new
credit card number was issued to Mrs. Landenberger on Feb. 21, but
Mrs. Landenberger noted that many of the calls listed on her huge bill
were dated after that.
When the phone company finally notified her of the size of her
bill, Mrs. Landenberger said she got ''a tiny bit frightened.''
''I know I'm an honest person, and my friends all know that I'm an
honest person, but what does the telephone company know about me,''
she said. ''As far as they are concerned, I'm not above susupicion. I
could be running a numbers operation or something.''
The phone company evidently had no doubts about Mrs. Landenberger.
But until further investigation, the spokesman said, it was unclear
whether her case represented an aberration or a serious flaw in the
security of telephone credit cards.
Unlike credit cards used in stores, telephone credit cards need
never be shown to anyone.
A credit-card caller on a Touch-Tone phone simply punches in a
personal identification number that is printed on the card. On rotary
phones, the caller tells the number and some other information to the
operator.
Mrs. Landenberger said she got her telephone credit card a decade
ago so that she could call and receive calls from her children while
they were away at college.
Now, she said, she sometimes uses it to call or take calls from
her children, who are in France, the Philippines, New York City and
Providence, R.I.
nyt-03-11-84 2126est ***************
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 84 13:20:45 EST
From: Ron Natalie <ron@brl-vgr>
Subject: Re: station equipment, intellectual property, etc.
You should know that the FCC compliance regulations on the telephone
are to protect the phone company from the phone, not the phone from
the phone company. This was done to counter the claim form TPC that
allowing phones other than theirs to be hooked up would degrade the
central system.
-Ron
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 84 08:51 EST
From: Wegeng.Henr@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: Re: Fire Prevention
I guess that I should have clarified that the AT&T concern was with
power line shorts on the telephone pole itself, not with plugging the
phone cord into the wall outlet. I'm still wondering if this is a
serious problem.
==dw
------------------------------
Date: 12-Mar-84 18:40 PST
From: William Daul Tymshare OAD Cupertino CA <WBD.TYM@OFFICE-2>
Subject: Bell's National Security Group In Operation
Location: <AUGMENT,107234,>
>From MICROWAVE SYSTEM NEW (Feb. 1984)
The Central Services Organization of the seven Bell Regional Holding
Companies said that its National Security and Emergency Preparedness
(NS/EP) Group, located in Washington D.C., is now operating to meet
the nationwide telecommunications planning and response needs of the
Bell companies.
In order to meet NS/EP requirements after the split-up of the Bell
System the federal court agreement requires that the company establish
and maintain a centralized communications group as a single point of
contact for all national security and emergency preparedness matters,
Marvin Konow, director of the group said.
The group will advise and provide coordination to the Bell Operating
Companies (BOCs) in the development of national security and emergency
preparedness technical standards and nationwide telecommunications
planning. An emergency alerting and respone center has been formed to
alert the BOCs in the event of an emergency or crisis, the
spokesperson said. The group will also participate in national
industry-wide groups sponsored by the government to coordinate
emergency and crisis communications activities and nationwide network
planning.
------------------------------
Date: 13 Mar 1984 13:51-PST
Sender: GEOFF@SRI-CSL
Subject: Mrs. Landenberger wasn't the only one in NY to get zapped.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff @ SRI-CSL>
n013 0747 13 Mar 84 PM-PHONE By ROBERT D. McFADDEN c.1984 N.Y. Times
News Service
NEW YORK - While the culprits who ran up $109,504.86 in global
calls on a Westchester (N.Y.) County woman's telephone credit card
remained unidentified Monday, three more instances of similar fraud
totaling more than $114,000 came to light.
The New York Telephone Co. said Dr. John Weinstock of Golden's
Bridge got a 505-page bill for more than 4,000 fraudulent
long-distance calls in February totaling $61,180.55. It also said a
subscriber in Chappaqua, who asked not to be identified, got a bill
for $18,399.77 in fraudulent February credit-card calls.
In yet another case, Barbara Zerzan, a resident of Manhattan, was
reported to have received a 710-page bill for more than $35,000 in
bogus credit-card calls during February. The telephone company said
last night that it could not immediately confirm the report.
Meanwhile, investigators for the telephone company pored over the
2,578-page, 15,000-call February bill of Jane Landenberger, of
Bedford, whose case was reported over the weekend.
The fact that three of the four cases involved Westchester County
subscribers suggested that someone in the telephone company's White
Plains office, which is the headquarters for the area, might have been
the conduit for the subscribers, numbers. This possibility was under
investigation, company officials said.
A company spokesman, Tony Pappas, said that telephone credit-card
fraud was an increasingly serious problem.
''The problem of fraudulent calls has become a major concern of
the company to a point where we have asked all employees to cooperate
in protecting credit-card numbers and to let us know of abuses they
might be aware of,'' said Pappas, the company's director of press
relations.
With more than six million subscribers and one million credit
cards in circulation in the state, the telephone company now confronts
more than $14 million a year in fraudulent credit-card calls, Pappas
said.
In the last two months, 29 people have been arrested on charges of
misusing credit-card numbers. The charges are misdemeanors, meaning
that they are punishable by fines and no more than one year in jail,
Mr. Pappas said.
Unlike credit cards used in stores, telephone credit cards need
never be shown. A caller using Touch Tone phones punches in a personal
identification number printed on the card, and callers using
rotary-dial phones give the number and usually some other information
to an operator.
In each of the cases currently under investigation, Pappas said,
the calls were evidently made by many people who had somehow obtained
a subscriber's home telephone number and telephone credit-card number.
The calls were made to and from numerous points in the United States,
Europe, South America, Africa and the Far East.
The pattern of calls - often hundreds a day from widely separated
points - suggested that the subscribers' numbers were circulated to
many people quickly, before the volume and pattern of calls could
become known to the authorities.
In each case, the credit cards were canceled by the subscribers,
but, as the subsequent bills noted, the calls continued to be put
through on those cards for some time afterward.
The frauds will not cost the subscribers anything. Mrs.
Landenberger will be assessed only $47.03, her actual charges, and the
other subscribers will be accorded similar consideration.
Dr. Weinstock, a physician, and his wife, Connie, a
psychotherapist, were taken aback by their bill, which listed calls to
Ecuador, Peru, China, Japan, Sweden and other places.
The Weinstocks and Mrs. Landenberger did not know each another,
but spoke by telephone over the weekend.
''I spoke to her Sunday night after we heard about her having the
same problem,'' Mrs. Weinstock said. ''We were at a party, telling our
fantastic story, and somebody said, '$61,000? That's nothing. There
is a story about this woman who had $109,000.' ''
nyt-03-13-84 1046est ***************
------------------------------
Date: Thu 15 Mar 84 01:39:23-EST
From: Ralph W. Hyre Jr. <RALPHW@MIT-XX.ARPA>
Subject: AC Power vs. step by step
Last night some real winners connected the AC power line across one of
our Dormline instruments. (Dormline is the local MIT phone system
connecting the dormitories. It is a step by step system).
This had the unfortunate effect of blowing out the first line finder
for 100 phone numbers (the 6300 series), so many people had no
dialtone. (Incoming calls could still be received.) Several
instruments were damaged or destroyed by the excessive voltage, and
started smoking.
Is this a 'normal' occurence with step-by-step (could it happen
anywhere? - the MIT dormline system is ~30 years old)? Also, is there
any way to protect against this happening in the future?
- Ralph Hyre
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End of TELECOM Digest
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