-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- an excerpt from: The Biggest Company On Earth Sonny Klienfield©1981 Holt, Rinehart & Winston ISBN 0-03-045326-7 321 pps. – First edition -- ----- Looking for something else, but came across this interesting piece of history. Om K ---- 15 Blue Boxes and Phone Phreaks Someone makes a long-distance collect call to a pay phone that a friend is stationed at. The friend accepts the charges, but of course there's no one to bill. A man calls home person-to-person and asks to speak to himself. Naturally, he's not there. He leaves word for himself to call back at 6:05. That information, exchanged free of charge, lets his wife know he's heading home on the 6:05 train. Someone calls up a refund control operator on a pay phone. He lies that he just lost a dollar in the phone. A credit is applied to his home bill. A person makes a brief long-distance call, then notifies the operator that he misdialed the number. Policy is to take his word. The call vanishes from his bill. Someone is particularly adept at electronics, so he builds himself a "blue box," an ingenious contrivance that enables the user to dial anywhere, anytime, free. These are just a small sampling of the numberless schemes devised to outfox the phone company. People have tried them all. They have gotten away with them all. Enough have tried and succeeded, in fact, that AT&T, the butt of most toll theft, figures that it is hobbled by provable losses from fraud of around $40 million a year. But that's just what it knows it's been robbed of. With so much chicanery that it fails to catch, it thinks the actual numbers are much higher-perhaps double. That isn't all that much money stacked next to revenues from phone usage—a staggering $27 billion in 1979—but the phone company is convinced that if it didn't work hard at ferreting out crooks, the losses would explode into the hundreds of millions of dollars and possibly strangle the entire phone system. "Fraud remains at a high level, and you might say it's straining to burst its shackles," Bill Caming told me. The cost of theft is actually dug out of the pockets of everyone who has a phone. As Caming worded it: "Toll fraud involves the commission of theft of the company that must be borne ultimately by our subscribers. It attacks every last customer's pocketbook." The blue box is the most nefarious fraud device in telephony. Borrowing its name from the color of the original boxes, it is the weapon of the so-called phone phreaks, the loose federation of whizkids who dash phantomlike through the phone company's long-distance lines and have achieved almost a cult status. The gadget, however, has proven to be a popular intoxicant to a motley crew of users: businessmen, film stars, doctors, lawyers, college students, even high school students. Out of 653 blue box users the phone company has managed to interrogate in the last few years, nearly half were businessmen. The next biggest category was criminals, who find it alluring because it leaves no record of their calls. An inventive twenty-seven-year-old MIT student was convicted for making blue boxes and selling them at $300 a box. Two hundred boxes, ready for delivery, were found piled in his apartment. Bernard Cornfeld, the millionaire financier and playboy, was convicted of blue box calling. So was nightclub singer Lainie Kazan. Actor Bob Cummings was placed under arrest and charged with blue box use, though he avoided trial under a double jeopardy ruling. "People aren't doing it just for financial reasons, that seems awfully obvious," Caming told me. "There seems to be a tremendous appeal in getting something for nothing." I spoke with Caming in his spare, modern office in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. He is in his fifties, with short-cropped white hair, deep-get eyes, and an expression that is a combination of whimsy and intentness. I asked him how a little blue box was able to place the entire telephone system of the world at the mercy of its user. Caming reached into one of his desk drawers and yanked out a shiny blue box that had been engineered to slip easily into a pants pocket. "This is typical of many of them," he said, holding it aloft. It was a small rectangular gadget with thirteen tiny pushbuttons protruding from it. "It's a little bigger than some. But it fits nicely into a Marlboro cigarette box or a box for business cards." With a certain practiced air, Caming began describing what you do with a blue box. Naturally, he wouldn't in his wildest dreams actually initiate a blue box call, even for demonstration purposes, so he contained any temptation to scoop up the receiver of the phone on his desk and explained the process verbally. "Generally, you begin the call by dialing a no-charge number, like to Information in a distant city or to an eight hundred number like Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward or one of the airlines. You hear the ringing of the call. So far, everything is legit. Now, I press a button-this one at the top." A high-pitched cheep sounded from the box. "That is a twenty-six hundred cycle tone, the telltale blue box tone." Caming explained that the entire long-distance switching system is operated on twelve electronically generated combinations of six master tones. You hear those tones sometimes in the background after you've dialed a number. (These are not the tones you hear in Touch-Tone phones.) "What that twenty-six hundred tone does is more or less dislodge the call. When that's detected by our equipment, it indicates that the circuit is ready for the next call. The tone is similar to a tone we have in our equipment to signal that the equipment is ready for a call. Then the blue box has the capability to do what only an operator can do. You push a button called the Key Pulse button." Caming pushed it, and a different tone sounded. "The KP signals to the equipment that a call is coming through—a toll call. Then you dial the number you wish on the blue box. You can dial anywhere in the world at this point. You can call London. Call Hawaii. Call Hong Kong. After you dial the number, you press the start button, which sends the call through. That call never registers in our billing system. When you ultimately hang up, say ten minutes later, the equipment will show only that you hung up on a free call. What's more, you can make more than one call if you do it within a certain number of seconds. There's a several-second lag before there's a disconnect. It's like if you hang up, it's a few seconds before you get a dial tone." Caming twirled the blue box in his hand, seemingly entranced by the knowledge that something so small and harmless-looking could have caused his company and him so much anguish. "So this is the blue box," he went on. "What does it cost? Probably twenty-five to fifty dollars if you have the know-how to make it. What does it cost to buy? Up to three thousand dollars. By the way, if you happen to have been blessed with perfect pitch, you don't need a blue box. You can simply whistle the tones into the phone and fool the equipment. A number of people have done it." Caming then remarked that there is also a less popular device that's been christened the black box. It is installed at the jack of a phone and avoids any charge for calls to that phone. "When you have ringing," Caming explained, "you will normally have current on the line to cause the ringing. When you pick up, that signals that the call has been completed and the billing should begin, if there's billing involved. The black box intercepts the call so that it cuts off the ringing. Thus no billing. Calls, however, would have to be made at appointed times, so the recipient would know when to pick up. The more sophisticated black box in use today, though, has a switch that kills the ringing before the phone is answered. That means that if you call me from a phone booth, you'll get your coin back because it looks as if you didn't complete the call. The device is of no particular benefit to the person getting the calls, except if he happens to be a bookie. Bookies, I would suppose, are the biggest black box culprits." A man who adopted the pseudonym Alexander Graham Bell, I had been told, claimed to have invented the black box, and he supposedly sold both black and blue boxes to gamblers. "What's the going price of a black box?" I asked. "About three dollars to make," Caming said. "And from a hundred bucks up to several thousand to buy." Caming mentioned that there is also a red box that simulates the sounds of coins dropping into a pay phone box. "Of course, this has limited use," he pointed out, "since it's only good in a pay phone and is kind of cumbersome to use for very expensive calls." People have also tried, with some success, tape recordings of coins dropping into the coin box of a public phone. Some years ago, an undergraduate at the University of Texas was casually making a phone call from a pay booth when some friends, as a joke, turned the booth on its side. Not overly bothered, he continued to feed coins into the slots and discovered that the odd position caused nickels to sound like quarters to the operators. Fellow students wallowed in discount rates for months before Bell caught on and bolted the booth in place. Other people, known to the phone company as "stuffers," have found it profitable to shove tissue paper into the coin return slots of pay phones. Later on, they return, remove the paper, and retrieve any coins that were blocked. One stuffer that the phone company nabbed some years ago crowed that he pocketed between $50 and $100 a day using the tissue dodge. AT&T is certain that it's losing $1 million a year from the colored boxes. However, it figures that there are so many undetected improper calls -being placed that the actual deficit probably ranges between $10 million and $20 million a year. It has been rounding up several hundred boxes annually since the early 1970s. The federal penalties are stiff- a maximum of five years in jail and a $1,000 fine. But the phone phreaks, for the most part, remain undaunted. Electronic theft was in full swing when AT&T caught wind of it in 1961. It first learned of the nefarious electronic boxes through police raids and informants, as well as from some irregular signals on its network. The first actual blue box user that AT&T ran across was a college student in the state of Washington. When it found out about the theft, AT&T was faced with a perplexing problem. Did it have to undertake the Herculean task of redesigning the entire signaling function of the telephone system, a chore that could cost as much as $1 billion? Or could the problem be throttled in some cheaper fashion? The first thing the company decided to do was get a fix on what it was up against. Accordingly, Bell Labs was asked to mint some fraud-detection equipment, and by 1964 it came up with electronic scanning units. The monitoring equipment was dispatched to central offices in St. Louis, Detroit, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and Newark, suspected centers of toll-fraud doings. The scanners would randomly tap into a trunk line and fish out a call, automatically recording the opening minute of conversation. If the scanners detected that the tape was clean of telltale signals, the recording was promptly erased. But if the tape sounded suspicious to the scanners, it would run on, sometimes for the full length of the conversation. Tapes of suspect calls were then shipped to New York by registered mail, where AT&T security people analyzed them further. The project plowed on until May of 1970, at which juncture about 30 million calls-out of roughly 1 trillion placed-were sampled. Something on the order of 1.8 million calls were actually recorded, many of them proving to be legitimate after security listened to them. But about twenty-five thousand seemed fishy, and the phone company netted more than two hundred convictions from the project. AT&T didn't publicly divulge the scanning operation until early 1975, immediately sparking heated protests from consumer groups and furrowed brows from civil libertarians and Congress. However, several subsequent court cases did uphold the phone company's right to snoop on conversations of subscribers it had reason to believe were dodging toll charges. >From the project, AT&T concluded that it had a grave problem on its lines, but not one serious enough to warrant a redesign of the whole network. It figured that vigorous detection and prosecution could outwit the crooks. And thus AT&T's security force resolved to pursue cheaters almost with the intensity with which detectives stalk gang rapists. Bell Labs, in the interim, had cooked up more advanced scanning equipment that was rushed into central offices throughout the country in 1970. Bell also happily discovered another fruitful source of help. "We built up a good supply of informants," Caming told me, "who contact us or law enforcement people to tip us off to toll fraud or the manufacture of these boxes. Some awfully big cases have been cracked by tips from informants." Still better monitoring equipment was devised in the last couple of years, so that much of the phone system is now ceaselessly scanned, at bewildering speed, by computerized machinery that picks out blue and black box calls and almost instantaneously taps out on a teletypewriter the calling number of the user. "We're like a searchlight at an airport that constantly revolves through the sky," Caming said with satisfaction. "With our present system, any blue box or black box call will surface eventually, almost without exception." In New York City, he pointed out, phone security people recently broke up a ring of three blue boxers who were "selling" calls to indigent people. They duped their victims into thinking they were benefiting from discount rates, when, in fact, the fees they collected were steeper than the actual tariffs. More than three hundred people were bilked by the ruse, until the phone company detected the flood of calls and started charging victims for them. The perpetrators, though, were never nabbed. In late 1979, however, an entrepreneur operating a similar business was caught by the phone company. The suspect, a thirty-six-year-old night switchboard operator at New York University, allegedly used a blue box to complete overseas calls through the switchboard for hundreds of customers, who paid about a tenth of standard overseas tariffs. The phone company estimated that he had robbed it of $1 million over a four-year period, netting for himself roughly $100,000. Chinks still remain in the phone company's armor. All of the phone network still isn't monitored by fraud-detection gadgets, and furthermore it's almost impossible to catch blue boxers who work through pay phones and keep their calls short. Things may improve in the 1980s, when a good deal of the country will have its long-distance calls flash across a common channel interoffice signaling system. Since, under this technology, billing information shoots over a different path from the conversation, blue box calls will be all but impossible. Who are these phone phreaks? The most infamous of the fraternity is Captain Crunch. His real name is John Draper. He acquired the nickname by starting off using a toy whistle from a Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal box, which the Captain learned just happened to produce a perfect 2600-cycle tone. He was born in 1943 in San Francisco and started out as an engineer working for himself. Around 1969, he got into blue boxes. According to the Captain, he was accidentally contacted by a blue box user who switched him onto a conference call with a bunch of other phone phreaks. The incident printed itself on his memory. "I was interested not in making free calls, but in learning about the network." Among other things, the Captain discovered that every exchange in the country had open test numbers that will allow other exchanges to test connections with it. When two people from anywhere in the country dial consecutive test numbers they can talk together just as if one had called the other's number, with no charge to either of them. Among his talents, the Captain has perfect pitch and ears that he describes as "a twenty-thousand-dollar piece of equipment." The Captain, however, ran afoul of the law. He was arrested in California in 1972 on a charge of fraud by wire. He paid a fine of $1,000 and was put on five years probation. In 1976, he was caught again (he lamented that he was set up by informers) and traded some secrets about his techniques for a token five-month jail sentence and five years probation. When I spoke with him, the Captain was living in New York's Soho district and billed himself as a telecommunications consultant to small businesses. Hire him, he said, and he'd slice your phone bill (legally). "I cut one company's bill in half by reconfiguring their WATS line," he told me. "I can't tell you the name of any of my clients. After all, Captain Crunch is an evil figure when it comes to the establishment." The Captain, who had long dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a mustache, said he had no phone of his own. He claimed he was scared of phones. He said he worried that a friend would make an illegal call and get him in trouble. He said he was a big patron of the pay phones, and insisted that he plunked real coins in them like anyone else. "I don't ever anticipate having a personal phone again," he told me. The Captain said he no longer consorted with other phone phreaks, though he crowed that there were tens of thousands of them still cutting into the phone lines. "I think that blue box use is increasing, not decreasing," he said. "Every time someone gets busted, more people become aware of blue boxes and they're tempted to use them. At least a hundred people are using blue boxes every day in every city of a hundred thousand or more. I know this just from the amount of people I've been in contact with. I saw two people in the Port Authority a couple of weeks ago using blue boxes. When I pass through O'Hare Airport, I continually hear-cheep, cheep, cheep. Now, if I'm seeing people use them, you better believe those boxes are being used. The important thing is to make your calls at a pay phone. The phone company is really catching people at home. It's almost impossible these days to get away with it at home. A friend of mine said that right after he made a blue box call, the security department at the phone company called up and said they'd be over in twenty minutes to pick up his box. Well, he wasn't there when they came, so they disconnected the phone." The Captain went on to say that many of the die-hard phone phreaks have junked their blue boxes, now that the phone company has gotten so sophisticated, and have shifted to nonelectronic means of theft, which he said were pretty easy to get away with. I asked the Captain how he felt about the phone company. "Well, the system is okay, but I think the people who run it should take a better attitude toward the customer." He said that he knew of an experimental phone company installation out in Iowa that could be programmed to do just about anything' including tapping into anybody's phone line. He called it a "super-snooper" that he said was part of an all-out assault by the phone company to ferret out crooks. He speculated further that he thought the phone company would use it to let-the CIA and the FBI illegally tap the phones of people they were investigating. After the Captain's charges about the Iowa "super-snooper" got into print, AT&T said it thoroughly scoured its Iowa's facilities and didn't find anything of the sort. I asked the Captain what he would do to improve the phone company. "You could take the Robin Hood view and steal from the rich and give to the poor," he said. '!Make the businessman pay more and the resident pay less. You could have the phone customer pay a flat rate-say thirty bucks a month-and for that you could call anywhere. At first, the system would be overloaded. Everybody would be calling all over the map. But after a while, you'd get sick of calling everyone. You wouldn't want to call Aunt Jemima anymore. Calling patterns would drop to normal. So you'd get rid of all the time charges in the system, and you could dispose of all this equipment needed to supervise these calls. I'm not saying my way is infallible. But it might work. It just might." In March of 1979, some months after I had spoken with him, the Captain was sentenced to a year in San Jose Prison for violating probation by placing fraudulent long-distance calls. He was allowed to serve his sentence under the federal work furlough program. "You have to pay for your long-distance phone calls," the judge who sentenced him admonished. "Is that a very difficult concept to grasp?" Oddly enough, one of the redoubtable phone phreaks of yesterday now works for AT&T. Joe "The Whistler" Engressia has been blind since birth. He has perfect pitch. He can whistle phone tones better than phone company equipment. Since he was four years old, The Whistler has had one direction in his life, and that was to learn all he could about the phone company and some day work for it. "When I was four, I learned how to dial the time," The Whistler told me when I got in touch with him. "Phones always entranced me. I used to play Telephone Man. I told my mother I was going to grow up to become a telephone man. The phone was just all sorts of adventures for me. I learned to type over the phone. This retired secretary who didn't have much else to do used to call me and explain where the keys were." At seven, he learned his first phone stunt. One of his baby-sitters put a lock on the phone dial to keep him from always playing with the phone. He got mad and started banging the receiver up and down. He discovered that by banging it once it dialed. Another bang, another dial. Soon, he learned to control the dialing by varying the intensity with which he pressed the hookswitch. When he was eight, he learned about whistling. He used to dial nonworking number recordings to listen to them. As he listened, he would whistle. Once, while he was whistling, the recording clicked off. Shortly, he figured out what was going on. Engressia went to the University of South Florida, and while he was there he would whistle long-distance connections for fellow students. In 1968, however, the phone company smoked him out. He was disciplined by the college, and the whole case got into the newspapers all over the country. He cut out calling for a while. In the months after his curious talents were exposed, though, Engressia began receiving streams of calls, some from other blind youths with whistling talents and some from blue boxers. Blue boxes must be within 2 percent accuracy to work, and owners used to call Engressia and have him tune their boxes by ear. "Didn't pay as well as piano tuning, but it was steady work." Engressia, in effect, became a link for the phone phreaks; he brought them together. A nationwide underground gradually grew up. They called each other and exchanged tricks. At age twenty-two, The Whistler first got out on his own, when he moved to Memphis. "I resumed making whistled calls. It was a bit expensive being on my own. I was getting ninety-seven dollars a month total income from welfare. No one would hire me. One guy told me, 'Gee, that's great, you got your clothes on straight. How did you do it?' Now, of course, there weren't too many ways of putting your pants on crooked, even if you were blind." To augment his income, Engressia sold courses for a correspondence school and cemetery lots by phone. He relentlessly pursued knowledge of the phone system. He would regularly show up at a central office switch room, explain in a polite voice that he was a blind college student interested in telephones, could he please have a guided tour of the station. Naturally, he was escorted around, touching switching circuits, crossbar arrangements, panel units, figuring out the phone system. He would travel hundreds of miles in every direction on the bus just to examine some new equipment he had heard about. Repeatedly, The Whistler tried to persuade the phone company to hire him, but he had no luck. So he decided to get arrested. "I figured you can say a lot of nice things and not get a mule to move. Then you can hit it over the head with a two-by-four and it will start running like hell. I decided to have my whistle be the two-by-four." The Whistler had a blue box made for him, and in May 1971 he called the United States Embassy in Moscow. He had a bunch of phone phreaks on the line with him. A marine guard picked up. The Whistler said that he was a disc jockey from a San Francisco radio station, and the listening public was just wondering how it felt to be out there, all alone, in Russia. The marine guard explained, at length. Prior to placing-the call, The Whistler had told the phone company that he was experiencing some trouble on his line, and so it readily detected what was going on. A few days later, The Whistler was arrested. He pleaded not guilty to possession of a blue box and theft of service. The judge reduced the charges to malicious mischief and found him guilty. He was sentenced to sixty days in jail, but the sentence was suspended after The Whistler promised not to monkey with the phones anymore. Out of the experience, he found a job cleaning phones for the Millington (Tennessee) Telephone Company. "It wasn't quite the sort of job I expected to get. I really wanted to work for Bell, but they wouldn't touch me." The Whistler told me that he gave up cleaning phones in 1972, then became a phone solicitor for a small outfit. The company went bankrupt, and so in 1975 he moved to Denver into a high-rise apartment. He long nourished a dream (second only to working for Bell) to live in a high-rise. "To me, the high-rise represented independence and orderliness. You had all the facilities inside and instant service. You could lean out on the balcony and hardly hear the ground. I used to have an envelope labeled 'high-rise.' It began with twenty-six cents in it and I would periodically stash some money in it until I had two thousand dollars." While living in his high-rise (twelfth floor; it had to be above ten for him to feel comfortable), The Whistler would appear at public utility hearings on phone rates. He attended the annual meeting of Mountain Bell, the regional AT&T operating company, and he would regularly call up maintenance people and tip them off to phone problems he detected. "Finally, I got in touch with a Mountain Bell personnel man, and after months and months of interviews-they were really very suspicious of me—I was hired as a troubleshooter in the network services center. I still don't believe I have this job. Sometimes I sit here at my desk and I feel my Bell insignia on my chest and I can't believe it. It blows my mind. I must be the luckiest person on earth." Engressia began to demonstrate some of his talents to me. He said he was a bit out of breath from talking so much (we were speaking on the phone), so he played me some tunes on his push-button phone. "Swanee River" pulsated across the longdistance lines, followed by "Dixie." Then a high-pitched voice said, "This is Mountain Bell Telephone. Have tone, will phone." Finally, Engressia came back in his own voice. I asked The Whistler, who's thirty now, if he was currently in contact with phone phreaks, and he said he rarely heard from any of them. "I was never a diehard," he said. "I wasn't interested in ripping off the company. I was interested in the pure joy of the system. It's an incredible jigsaw puzzle that never ceases to amaze me. And it's really not worth it to fool with Bell. Over the long run, it's pretty hard to get away with it. It's like robbing a bank. You may rob ten banks and then feel pretty swell, but at the eleventh bank you get killed." The Whistler used to talk a lot to Captain Crunch back in his phone phreak days, but he rarely hears from him anymore. "Once in a while, the Captain gives me a call," Engressia said. "I ask him how it feels being this one man against the big Bell System, and he says, 'Well, it can get pretty lonely out there, but somebody's got to do it."' A brooding presence of nonelectronic tricks are played on the phone company. They're not easy to squelch, either. In 1979, for instance, AT&T estimates that these shenanigans drained it of roughly $39 million in toll revenues. The heftiest chunk of the fraud is accomplished by the credit card dodge. Either stolen or bogus cards are used to place calls. All it takes is for someone to overhear a businessman reciting his card number into the phone and he's got a billable card. Underground magazines are fond of printing articles describing how to fabricate credit card numbers (certain combinations of numbers are consistent in them), or they simply publish exhaustive lists of numbers certified to work. Some diligent individuals have trained scanner receivers on conversations between mobile phones, as a means of getting hold of credit card digits. Considering that there are nearly 8 million cards in people's wallets, the potential for abuse is great. Unauthorized third number billing-charging a call to a fake number or a real number you have no business charging calls to-cost AT&T about $19 million in 1979. Phone phreaks have urged people to feel free to bill calls to places like the FBI or the White House (though AT&T, when I asked it, said this hasn't been a problem). In Carney, Nebraska, some years ago, a traveler from New Jersey figured he'd call home free by plucking a name at random out of the local phone book and charging the call to that name and number. Unluckily for him, he picked out of 12,000 names the manager of the local phone company. The operator readily recognized the name and called the police. Credit card and third party fraud is tough to stop. Operators do check credit card and third party numbers to some extent, AT&T says, but the certification process is by no means definitive. When an undue amount of fraud crops up, fishy card numbers and third party numbers are circulated among operators. Call patterns are analyzed. But the phone company admitted to me that an abuse here and there probably will slip through. Some advanced new hardware, years in the making, will be hustled into use within the next couple of years, I was told. The phone company boasted to me that the equipment should substantially stamp out most credit card and third number fraud. But it's keeping the details of the hardware under wraps. "We wouldn't be very smart giving away the key to the vault, would we?" a telephone man explained. Sundry other tricks, like calling collect to coin phones and code calling, sock AT&T for millions of dollars in losses, as well. The company has prosecuted entire businesses for imbibing in code calling. Department stores and sales firms, using the cover of person-to-person calling, have fashioned codes to order merchandise from suppliers. Someone calls a supplier and asks for Mr. Trapper. He's told he's out (since he doesn't exist). The person says he'll call back in thirty minutes. That could translate to an order of thirty cases of ball bearings. Truckers have been known to deploy similar codes to inform collection points of when they are likely to arrive with goods. It happens to be illegal to notify someone that you got someplace safely by arranging to call at a specified time and let the phone ring three times before hanging up. That is passing information across a phone line without paying for it. AT&T, when I asked them about enforcement, admitted that it's just about impossible to ever convict anyone of this ruse. Likewise, if you call up refund control and request a refund for money you claim you lost in the phone, the practice is to believe the customer and automatically grant the money. However, if you begin to pocket $10 or so every month, you can bet that the phone company will check you out. To help root out non-electronic fraud, the Bell System maintains seventy-four Centralized Ticket Investigation units spotted around the country. Experienced operators in these units try to puzzle out who should pay for unbillable calls. A visit to one of the biggest CTIs was arranged for me, provided I didn't disclose the location or quote anybody by name. It was a big, rectangular, fluorescent-lit space. Ticket investigators were huddled over tickets representing calls. A few were on the phone. Along the wall sat microfiche machines where master lists of all operator-handled calls made in the area could be peeked at. The CTI director, a cordial, gravelly faced man, explained the operation. "We do about seven thousand investigations a day," he said. "The first thing is to see if there's a simple error—a number transposed from a credit card, an incorrect area code. Almost half of the tickets are easily corrected in this way." Investigators latch on to possible fraud-which shows up in about 10 percent of the cases-by riffling through call patterns and frequently used fraudulent credit card and third party numbers, and by resorting to what the director called "a sixth sense that these people develop." He said that the general practice was to pass on a fraud case to security for final investigation and possible prosecution when it gets to $50 and there's a suspect, or when it hits $200, suspect or not. One case that was masterminded by a band of college students had ballooned to $8,000 worth of fraudulent calls a month before it was cracked. In late 1976, more than a hundred prisoners at the Metropolitan Correctional Center at Foley Square were caught having made $100,000 worth of fraudulent long-distance calls. Using bogus credit cards and third number billing, the convicts made something like two hundred calls a day on the jail's twenty-three pay phones, some of them as far away as South America. The mischief came to light when people started complaining to the phone company that they were being billed for calls they hadn't made. After the CTI tracked the problem down, the phone company threatened to yank all the phones from the jail, until a prison lawsuit was filed charging that removal would violate the prisoners' constitutional right to communicate with lawyers and relatives. Finally, the phone company arranged a plan under which the pay phones were rigged so that only prepaid calls could go through. The volume of calls reportedly dropped drastically once the inmates had to pay for them. The general feeling around AT&T is that it will probably always have to live with the specter of fraud. "As in any struggle between the forces of evil and those who try to stem them, there will always be some crime," an AT&T security man told me. "Thank goodness, the average customer is honest. If he made a call, he'll tell you he made a call. Thank goodness. If he wasn't honest, we'd be in a hell of a mess." pps. 247-261 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. 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