10
Friday, May 5, 1978
University Daily Kansan
Long distance
From page one
customer. If a customer has one telephone, the instrument that measures the current will register the current it takes to run the customer's single phone.
run the customer.
However if the cheater fails to wire the company correctly, the phone company's instruments will register more current than what the customer is paying for because it takes more current to ring more bells.
If done correctly, Jake said, the only way the phone company can catch you is if a serviceman is on the premises and happens to notice that the customer wants to leave for the job. The cost of buying the additional telephones is the only expense to the cheater.
ALTHOUGH JAKE did not condone telephone fraud, he said the telephone company did not always play fairly with the public.
Jake said a phone company serviceman, one of the lowest-ranking jobs in the company, had the ability to eavesdrop on any conversation, anytime.
The official title of the serviceman is a frameram. The frameram is responsible for installing and maintaining the thousands of individual connections necessary for any
A routine test of the frame is to clip it into a telephone line with a portable handset to the other end.
--set of them and said that the wires from all of the phones in the sub-station service area were connected into national trunk lines and local switching equipment in the sub-station.
switching equipment in the sub station
The frameman has access to every phone
conversation. Although the franmaner is not supposed to know what customer has what line, many of the lines are labeled on the frame with the name of the customer.
"IT'S THE NO. 1 source of entertainment on the frame," Jake said. "As far as I know it's practiced widely.
it's practiced.
"Random eavesdropping happened, worked by, fraternand and managers alike. It's so much fun that it's impossible to resist. Every phone in the country can be tapped by a fraternand and it takes no experience to be a fraternand."
Knight said no such activity ever went on in the Lawrence office.
"There's no monitoring of conversations," she said. "We just don't do that. If an employee would get caught, it would mean their job."
According to Jake, the phone company does not police itself as much as it its customers. A.T.A.T. has a corps of 74 centralized ticket investigation units scattered around the country to monitor non-electronic fraud.
The investigators are experienced operators who try to sort out who should pay for calls that cannot be billed. The corps does about 7,000 investigations a day.
**NIGHT SAID** that about 80 to 90 percent of the unpaid calls are made by night and are billed for the call.
most of these investigators spend their time investigating the unauthorized third
Unauthorized third-number billing involves the customer charging a call to a fake number or some real number the customer has no business charging a call to.
customer has no business talking
According to a story in the New York
Times, this type of fraud cost A.T. & T. about $9.1 billion last year. Phone "pleaks" people who cheat the phone company for entertainment, urged people to bill calls to places such as the F.B.I. or the White House, the New York Times reported said.
Knight said the most common type of phone fraud in a university community was the hone call involving a student placing a person-to-person call asking for himself to let his parents know he made it to school safety.
"OUR OPERATORS are alert to this kind of fraud," she said. "But it's also one of the hardest types of fraud to stop. They are well aware of their online message home without paying anything for it.
The biggest form of fraud performed by the public is the credit card dodge. This involves stolen or bogus telephone credit cards.
In addition to the person-to-person scheme, students try to connect additional phones into a residence where the customer is paying for only one phone, and students often put a phone in a fraudulent name to avoid paying the monthly bill.
All a customer has to do is tell the operator the number of the card. If the conversation with the operator ends, you could start charging calls to the credit card number.
About 7.6 million Americans have cards in their possession.
FALSE credit card calling costs the phone company about $11.3 million each year,
BY FAR, the most daring way to travel by long distance is by way of a device called a camera.
A 'blue box' is simply a pocket size instrument that allows the caller to "seize" a long distance line. Through its use, a caller can place calls to anyplace in the world.
'Blue box' usage is the most common concern of telephone executives, although more than a thousand people were arrested for, and 879 convicted of some form of long-distance fraud, the chances of a blue box user's ever getting caught are slim if the user never places a call from the same phone.
The blue box works on a simple principle of sound. The boxes are full of pre-recorded flute-like tones, tones that are identical to the instrument and can be played after you've dialed a long-distance number.
In the long-distance system, the tones are used to carry the number dialled by the caller. Each of the 10 tones on the telephone dial is a composition based on frequency tones played simultaneously to create a certain frequency.
HILLEL
the campus organization for Jewish students
presents a COFFEEHOUSE featuring folk singer BARRY BERNSTEIN
and
JAM SESSION
7:15-10:00 a.m.
Sunday May 7
50c for members
$1.00 for non-members
The entire operation of a blue box is much more complicated, but this is the general way it is used.
THE SECRET of the flute-like tones was
The accounting computer has been programmed to ignore the toll-free 800 calls when compiling monthly bills.
THE CALLER seizes a long-distance line by first dialing the 800 toll-free number of a company which might have its headquarters in the caller's destination.
At three o'clock the next morning, when the phone company's account computer starts reading back over the accounting cards for that day, it records that a call of a certain length of time was made from one location on an 800 number of the destination's location.
The caller, after he has seized the long-distance trunk line, then presses his blue box to the mouthpiece of the phone and asks for a number. The member of the party he's attempting to reach.
mistakenly released in a technical journal by Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers.
By 181, A.T. & T., estimates blue box calls will be virtually impossible to make because of a new system of long-distance routing, the Esquire story said.
According to Esquire magazine, once the secret was made public, the technology needed to create "beeper" devices was within the reach of any 12-year-old child.
Since that time, the telephone company has implemented a series of fraud-detection equipment. Once the equipment has detected a blue-box call, it types out the number of the victim and gives a portion of the conversation to be used as evidence in the event of a court case.
"But our security people are always on the hook to prevent their use as much as possible."
Knight said she was not surprised at the simplicity of the entire blue box scheme.
"The telephone is not that complicated of an instrument," she said. "I've read where there have been instructions to the blue box printed. It must be fairly easy to make.
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