Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [92]
After our first four wins, we knew the system was working, but we faced a new challenge: the radio station rules said that no one person could win the contest more than once a year. We started offering a deal to family, friends, and anyone else we knew well enough to think we could trust: “When the check arrives, you keep $400 for yourself and pass the other $600 along to us.”
Over the next three or four months, we won that contest about fifty times. In the end, we stopped only because we ran out of friends! It’s a shame Facebook didn’t exist yet—we would have had a lot more friends to work with.
The real beauty of it was that it wasn’t even illegal. I confirmed with an attorney that as long as we weren’t illegally accessing phone company equipment or using a friend’s identity without permission, it wasn’t fraud. Even when I first got the POTS number, I didn’t misrepresent myself as a phone company employee; I just asked for the number, and the lady gave it to me.
Technically, we were obeying the rules of the game, as well. The radio station had a rule that a person could win only once per year. We abided by that. We were simply exploiting a loophole. We never broke any of the rules.
Once I surprised myself by taking a long shot. The station provided a phone number you could call to listen to its shows over the telephone. I called in from my mom’s living room in Las Vegas, and when the contest came on, I called in, not really imagining I could reach the station just in time to be caller number seven. But then I heard the magic words, the congratulations… followed by the announcer’s asking, “What’s your name?” I hemmed and hawed until I thought of a friend we hadn’t used yet. I gave his name and covered the awkward pause by blurting out, “I’m so excited, I could hardly say my own name!”
The four of us each cleared nearly $7,000 from the whole thing. At one point, when I met Lewis in a restaurant and gave him his share, it was such a lot of cash that I felt like I was making a payoff in a drug deal or something.
I used a big chunk of my share to buy my first state-of-the-art laptop, a Toshiba T4400SX featuring a 486 processor that ran at what was then an impressive speed, a snappy 25 megahertz. I paid $6,000. And that was the wholesale price!
It was a sad day when we ran out of people we could trust to cooperate.
One night not long after we got into the radio contest business, I was driving back to my dad’s apartment when an idea popped into my head, a scheme that might give me some breathing room while I tried to get to the bottom of the Eric Heinz / Mike Martinez / Joseph Wernle / Joseph Ways mystery.
My idea was that Lewis would casually, in passing, let slip a piece of information about me to Eric. He’d say something like, “Kevin is thinking about working with some hackers in Europe. He’s sure this is gonna make him very rich.”
What I figured was this: whatever the Feds already had on me would seem like small beans next to the prospect of catching me red-handed in the middle of a big hack, stealing a load of dollars or Swiss francs or deutsche marks from some financial institution or corporation. They would want to keep close tabs on me but would be willing to wait patiently until I had pulled off this big one, anticipating how they’d swoop in, recover the money, and parade me in handcuffs before the hungry media people and the hungry-for-scandal public: the FBI saving America from another villain.
And while they were waiting for me to arrange the hack, I hoped, my supervised release would come to an end. It seemed like a great delaying action to buy myself some extra time.
Lewis’s attorney, David Roberts, couldn’t see anything wrong with this plan. Lewis and I met and discussed the details with him on several occasions. It wouldn’t be a violation of any law for Lewis to tell this lie, because he wouldn’t be telling it directly to a Federal agent.