Captain Crunch’s secrets, or beating the phone system

Press, 8 April 1978, Page 13

Captain Crunch’s secrets, or beating the phone system

By

N. R. KLEINFIELD,

of the “New York Times,” through NZPA

Some one makes a long distance collect call, to a friend at a pay phone. The friend accepts the charges, but there is no-one to bill. A man calls home per-son-to-person, and asks for himself. Of course he is not there. He leaves work for himself to call back at 6.5 pjn. That information, passed free of charge, lets his wife know he is heading home on the 6.5 p.m. train.

Someone calls up a re-fund-control operator on a pav phone. He lies, saying he" just lost a dollar in the phone. A credit is given on his home bill.

A person makes a brief long-distance call, then tells the operator he misdialled the number. The call vanishes from his bill. Someone makes a call and bills it to another person’s credit card or home phone. Someone is good at electronics, so he builds a blue box, a contraption that allows the user to dial anywhere, anytime, free. Those are just a few of the countless schemes to outfox the telephone company. People have tried "i ail. So many tried them, in fact, that the -unerican 1 eiephone and Telegraph Company, the victim of most toll theft, was hobbled by a record fraud year in 1977. It estimates its probable loses at about S27M, the steepest since 1972. when fraud hit $23,951. That is just what A.T.T. is aware it has been robbed of. It is not much money when sucked next to toll revenues, which totalled a staggering 818 billion last year. But the phone company feels that if it did not work hard at ferreting out crooks, the losses would explode into hundreds of millions of dollars. and possibly strangle the whole phone stem.

Last year. 1093 people were arrested, and 879

were convicted of some form of toll fraud against A.T.T. The most notorious fraud device is the clue box. Taking its name from the colour of the original boxes, it is the weapon of the so-called phone freaks, a loose federation of whiz kids who dart free and phantom-like through the phone company’s long-dis-tance lines. The phone

freaks have achieved almost a cult status. The box. however, has proved popular with businessmen, film stars, doctors. lawyers, college students, even high school students.

Of 653 blue box users the phone company has interrogated in the last few years, nearly half were businessmen. The next biggest group was criminals, who use it because it leaves no record of calls.

An inventive student was convicted of making blue boxes and selling them at 8300 apiece. Bernard Confeld, the millions aire financier was convicted of blue box calling. So was Lainie Kazan, the singer.

The original blue boxes were three times the size of a toaster. The latest models fit inside a cigarette package. Thirteen pus h-buttons protrude from

a blue box, and the user begins with a regular call, usually to a free number. Then he pushes a button that emits a high-pitched cheep, a tone set at 2600 cycles per second.

That cheep, in effect, seizes a long-distance line. After punching out some call instructions, the blue box user can then dial anywhere he wants. The

billing machinery picks up only the original free call. There are also black boxes that attach to a phone and snuff out the signal that reports a call has been completed — thus, all calls to that phone will be free. Lesspopular red boxes exist that simulate the dropping of coins into a coin phone. (Both black and red boxes also take their names

from the colours of the original devices). Much of the phone system is ceaselessly scanned, at bewildering speed, by computerised machinery that picks out blue box and black box calls and almost instantaneously on a teletypewriter the calling number of the user. Once A.T.T. is certain a fraudulent call is in progress, it tapes a small bit of it for evidence, the only time, it says, it ever records calls.

New York Telephone, handling the fraud-riddled New York city, installed some of the latest equipment last summer, and says it has since rounded up some 35 blue boxes. According to the phone company, the city had been hampered by three blue boxers who were selling calls to poor people at what were supposedly discount rates. They were actually higher than normal rates. More than 300 people were defrauded before the phone company detected the calls and charged for them. That scared the blue boxers off, although they were never caught.

Chinks remain in the system. Not all of the phone network is yet monitored by fraud-detec-tion hardware: and it is tough to catch blue-box users who work through

pay phones and keep their calls short. But by 1981, long-distance calls for much of the country will flash across a commonchannel inter-office system- Call information will travel over a different path from the actual conversation and different signalling will be involved, making blue box calls almost impossible. In late 1976, more than

a hundred prisoners at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre were caught having made 8100,000 worth of fraudulent long-distance calls. Using bogus credit calls and third-number billing, the convicts made something like 200 calls a day on the jail’s pay phones, some of them to South America.

Oddly enough, one of the redoubtable phone freaks of yesterday now works for A.T.T. Joe (the Whistler) Engressia. aged 28, blind since birth, has perfect pitch. He can whistle the 2600-cycle tone used by blue boxes to make long-distance calls free. Blue-box tones must be within 2 per cent accuracy to succeed, and their owners used to call up the Whistler and have him tune their boxes by ear.

Engressia says that since the age of four he wanted only to learn more about the phone company, and some day to worn for it. Blind, he had no luck. Then he found out about the 2600-cycle tones, and he figured that if he was arrested, the attention would land him a job. He tipped off the phone company that he would be making some blue-box calls. He dialled the American Embassy in Moscow. A guard answered, Engressia said 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 guard explained, at length. Engressia got thrown into jail. But the phone company did not hire him. While he held other jobs, he would call up A.T.T. people to alert them to problems he discovered in their system. It ultimately paid off. Last year, Mountain Bell hired him in Denver as a problem analyst. The best-known phone freak is Captain Crunch, more properly known as John Draper, aged 35. He picked up the nickname because he started using a whistle from a Captain Crunch cereal box that happened to emit a perfect 2600 cycle tone. He moved far past that. The Captain — as he likes to be called — was arrested twice in California. He served four months in jail, and is on probation. Not long ago, he was arrested on phonefraud charges in Pennsylvania. He professes innocence.

Now he lives in New York’s Soho district, and bills himslef as a telecommunications consultant to small businesses. Hire him. he says, and he will slice your phone bill (legally). He has no phone of his own. He is afraid of phones. He worries that a friend will make an illegal call and get him in trouble. The Whistler and the Captain used to chat a lot. .The Captain still occasionally calls the Whistler for old times sake. “Now and then,” the Whistler says, “I’ll tell him, ‘Hay Captain, how does it feel to be this one man against the might of the great Bell system?’ The Captain will pause, feeling good, then say, “Well, sometimes it’s scary, but somebody’s got to do it-”