Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [81]
On a call to Oakwood’s corporate headquarters, I asked for the name of a manager, then dialed the rental office at Eric’s building. The call was answered by a young lady with a pleasant voice and a helpful manner. Identifying myself as the manager whose name I had gotten, I said, “We’ve had a legal issue come up about one of the tenants there. I need you to fax me the rental application for Joseph Wernle.” She said she’d take care of it right away. I made sure the fax number she had for corporate was the same one I had just diverted to Kinko’s.
I waited until I thought the fax had been sent, then called the Kinko’s it was being forwarded to. I told the manager there that I was a supervisor at another Kinko’s location and explained, “I have a customer here who’s waiting for a fax. He just realized it was sent to the wrong Kinko’s.” I asked him to locate the fax and resend it to “my” Kinko’s. This second step would make it harder for any Feds to unravel my work. I call it “laundering a fax.”
Half an hour later, I stopped by the local Kinko’s and picked up the fax, paying cash.
But after all that effort, the application didn’t clear up anything. It only added to the mystery. The owners of corporate rental buildings usually require background information to make sure their new tenants don’t pose any financial risk. But in this case Oakwood had rented to a guy who had provided hardly any information at all. No references. No bank accounts. No previous addresses.
And most significantly, no mention of Eric’s name. The apartment had been rented in the same name the telephone service was under, Joseph Wernle. The only other piece of information on the entire application was a work phone number, 213 507-7782. And even that was curious: it was not an office number but, as I easily determined, a cell phone with service provided by PacTel Cellular.
Yet at least it gave me a lead to follow.
A call to PacTel Cellular gave me the name of the store that had sold the cell phone listed on Eric’s rental application: One City Cellular, in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, the area that includes the campus of UCLA. I made a pretext call to the store and said I wanted some information about “my” account.
“What’s your name, sir?” the lady on the other end asked.
I told her, “It should be under ‘U.S. Government’ ”—hoping she would correct my error… hoping it was an error. And at the same time hoping she would be helpful enough to give the name on the account.
She did. “Are you Mike Martinez?” she asked.
What the hell?!
“Yes, I’m Mike. By the way, what’s my account number again?”
That was taking a chance, but she was a retail clerk at a cell phone store, not a knowledgeable customer service rep at the cell phone company. She wasn’t the least bit suspicious and just read off the account number for me.
Heinz… Wernle… Martinez. What the fuck was going on?
I called the cell phone store back. The same young lady answered. I hung up, waited a bit, and tried again. This time I got a guy. I gave him “my” name, phone number, and account number. “I lost my last three invoices,” I said, and asked him to fax them to me right away. “I accidentally erased my address book off my cell phone and I need my bills to reconstruct it,” I said.
Within minutes, he was faxing the invoices. Driving a little too fast but not, I hoped, fast enough to get myself pulled over, I sped to Kinko’s. I wanted to know as soon as possible what was in those bills.
The fax turned out to be far more expensive than I expected. When I looked at Martinez’s bills, my jaw dropped. Each of the three monthly bills was nearly twenty pages long, listing well over a hundred calls. Many of them were to area code 202—Washington, DC—and there also were lots of calls to 310 477-6565, the Los Angeles headquarters of the FBI.
Oh, shit! One