Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [67]
I turned onto the 101 Freeway eastbound toward the I-10, which would take me east through the desert. My cell phone was at hand, as usual cloned to someone else’s phone number.
A funny thing about the freeway. A few weeks earlier, I had been cut off by a guy driving a BMW. Busy talking on his cell phone, he had suddenly switched lanes, swerving within inches of my car, scaring the crap out of me, and only barely missing wiping out both of us.
I’d grabbed my cell phone and made one of my pretexting calls to the DMV, running the BMW’s license plate and getting the owner’s name and address. Then I called an internal department at PacTel Cellular (only two cell phone companies serviced Southern California at the time, so I had a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right the first time), gave the guy’s name and address, and found that yes, PacTel Cellular had his account. The lady gave me his cell phone number, and hardly more than five minutes after the jerk had cut me off, I called and got him on the phone. I was still shaking with anger. I shouted, “Hey, you fucking dick, I’m the guy you fucking cut off five minutes ago and almost killed us both. I’m from the DMV, and if you pull one more stunt like that, we’re going to cancel your driver’s license!”
He must wonder to this day how some other driver on the freeway was able to get his cell phone number. I’d like to think that call scared the shit out of him.
Truth be told, though, that lesson in the dangers of using a cell phone while driving didn’t have much lasting impact on me, either. Once I had left behind the traffic noises and honking horns of the rush-hour freeways and settled in for my drive to Vegas, I was on the phone. My first call was to a number etched in my memory: the one for the Pacific Bell switching center that supported all the switches in the west San Fernando Valley area.
“Canoga Park SCC, this is Bruce,” a tech answered.
“Hi, Bruce,” I said. “This is Tom Bodett, with Engineering in Pasadena.”
The name I’d given was too familiar at the time: Bodett was an author and actor who’d been doing a series of radio ads for Motel 6, signing off with, “This is Tom Bodett, and I’ll leave the light on for you.” I had just tossed off the first name that came into my head. But Bruce didn’t seem to have noticed, so I kept right on. “How’s it going?” I asked.
“Fine, Tom, what do you need?”
“I’m working on an unusual case of trouble out of Calabasas. We’re getting a high-pitched tone—sounds like a thousand cycles. We’re trying to find where the call was originating from. Could you take a look?”
“Sure. What’s your callback number?”
Though Bruce hadn’t recognized my voice, I sure did know who he was. He’d been the target of social-engineering scams by me and other phone phreaks for years, and had been stung enough times that he had grown suspicious and protective. So anytime he got a call from somebody he didn’t know who claimed to be a company employee, he’d ask for a callback number—and it had better be a number he recognized as being internal to Pacific Bell. He’d ring off and dial you back.
Most phone phreaks either don’t bother to set up a callback number or don’t know how. They try to get away with some lamebrained excuse like “I’m just going into a meeting.” But Bruce was hip to all of that, and he wasn’t going to get conned again. So before my call, I had convinced a Pacific Bell employee that I was a company engineer who’d been sent to LA to tackle a technical problem and needed a temporary local phone number. Once that was set up, I put it on call forwarding to my cloned cell phone number of the day. When Bruce called back to the legitimate internal phone number I had given him, it rang through to my cell phone.
“Engineering, this is Tom,” I answered.
“Tom, this is Bruce calling you back.”
“Hey, thanks, Bruce. Could you take a look at this number—880-0653—in