Date   : Thu, 06 Jun 1985005:55:00-MDT
From   : Donn Seeley <donn@UTAH-CS.ARPA>
Subject: Need help stopping telephone harrassment

I have a friend (who shall remain nameless, for reasons that will
become obvious below) who has been subjected to some very
sophisticated telephone harrassment.  He doesn't have net access and
has asked me to try to use some of the immense combined experience of
the net to help him get to the bottom of his problems.

My friend has a son of high school age who likes to play with
computers.  The family has an Apple computer and a modem at home, and
the son uses it to dial in to various bboards in the area of his
suburban home in California.  It seems that one day the son attempted
to bluff his way onto a phone phreak bboard.  This was a mistake --
the boy was in way over his head, and when the bboard operators
learned this, they decided to teach him a lesson.  My friend's long
distance access code very rapidly propagated around the state and some
ridiculous charges began appearing on his monthly bills.  At the same
time he began receiving harrassing phone calls -- the phone would ring
during dinner or in the middle of the night, and when someone answered
it, no one would be on the other end.

After a couple months of this, my friend asked Pac Tel to trace the
harrassing phone calls.  The nature of the calls changed; perhaps the
son bragged about it to classmates or acquaintances on bboards, but
the bad guys heard about it and the callers began to say things.  They
said that they would vandalize my friend's property and that they
would assault his son, and eventually they began making death threats.
Pac Tel stalled on the traces; in the end they said that they couldn't
release the information that they had gathered because regulations
required that at least three of the calls had to originate from the
same number, and somehow this was not the case.  My friend was puzzled
about the rule, but he was even more puzzled about the fact that the
calls seemed to come from different numbers...  He and his family
began to get rather nervous, although the violence remained verbal.

My friend decided to do some investigating of his own and called up
some of the numbers that appeared on his long distance bill.  Many of
them turned out to be recordings of various kinds, such as
'dial-a-porn'; a few of them turned out to be homes with teenagers,
and the latter readily admitted that they had been given the access
code and told to 'get this guy', and to spread the number far and
wide.  Since it was clear that the original perpetrators could not be
traced through the long distance company, my friend changed his access
code and managed to convince the company to forgive the bogus charges.
Following this move the problems with long distance went away.

At about this time the harrassing phone calls stopped too.  My friend
isn't sure whether this was a result of the bad guys hearing about his
investigation through the grapevine, or whether Pac Tel was getting
warm, but he was grateful regardless.  Unfortunately this wasn't the
end of his problem.  When he got his phone bill at the end of the
month, he discovered that he was being charged for hundreds of dollars
worth of bogus toll calls through Pac Tel, all made in his local area
code.  Apparently all of the many numbers called were recordings, so
there was no one on the other end who could be asked about the calls.
Pac Tel said that the calls originated from his residential phone, but
it was quite clear that no one in the household could possibly be
doing it.  The family kept logs of where all its members were for
periods of weeks at a time, and these showed that the calls were being
made when the house was empty, or when the family was eating dinner
and so on.  Peculiarly, some of the numbers were called as many as 8
times in a single minute, which suggested that the caller was using an
auto-dialer (my friend does not own one) and that the calls were being
made to accumulate charges rather than to listen to the recordings.
On the basis of this evidence Pac Tel traced the house's local loop,
but could find no indication that it had been compromised in any way.
Pac Tel now steadfastly maintains that there is no other way of making
a call appear to originate from the residence's phone.  After several
months of wrangling, Pac Tel sent its own investigator to look at the
case.  After one phone call to my friend and three days of
'investigation', Pac Tel's man announced that my friend's son was
responsible for all the calls, and that my friend was liable for the
thousands of dollars worth of bogus calls that had been made over the
previous eight months.

My friend, at his wits' end, tried contacting the FBI.  They heard him
out and told him that because none of the bogus calls at any stage of
the case had crossed state lines, they had no jurisdiction.  (My
friend's heart sank when he realized that that the bad guys must have
thought of this in advance...) The FBI suggested that my friend call
the PUC.  This turned out to be a joke -- my friend couldn't even get
past the secretary.  My poor friend is now at the stage of hiring a
lawyer and preparing for the inevitable...  Meanwhile the bogus calls
continue, taunting him.

My friend and I can use any information you might have on how a stunt
like this could be perpetrated -- how can you make calls appear to
come from another number?  We don't need or want precise details on
how to beat the system; we just need enough to convince Pac Tel (or
(sigh) a judge) that there is an alternative explanation for the
calls...

Any help you can give would be deeply appreciated,

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

PS -- If you have something you'd prefer to communicate in person, and
you'll be attending the Usenix conference, by all means contact me
there.