Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [96]
“Search on the customer’s Social,” and I provided Wernle’s Social Security number.
After a moment, she said, “Okay, I’ve got two.”
I had her give me the numbers of both accounts, and the balances. The first part of the account number indicated the branch where the account was located; Wernle’s were both at the Tarzana branch in the San Fernando Valley.
A call to that branch with a request to pull Wernle’s “sig card” (signature card) put me in position to ask a key question I had been longing to have answered: “Who’s the employer?”
“Alta Services, 18663 Ventura Boulevard.”
When I called Alta Services and asked for Joseph Wernle, I got a chilly: “He’s not in today.” It sounded suspiciously as if the next sentence might have been “And we’re not expecting him.”
The rest was made to order in this era of “your banking information at your fingertips.” With Wernle’s account number and the last four digits of his Social in hand, I simply placed a phone call to the bank’s automated system and had it feed me back all the details I could want about his banking transactions.
What I learned only deepened the mystery: Joseph Wernle often had funds flowing into and out of his accounts totaling thousands of dollars every week.
Wow—what could this mean? I couldn’t imagine.
If he was running all this money through his bank account, I figured maybe his tax return would give me some useful clues about what was really going on.
I had learned that I could get taxpayer information from the Internal Revenue Service easily enough, just by social-engineering employees who had computer access. The IRS complex in Fresno, California, had hundreds of phone lines; I’d call one at random. Armed with foreknowledge based on my usual brand of research, I’d say something like, “I’m having problems getting into IDRS—is yours working?” (“IDRS” stands for “Integrated Data Retrieval System.”)
Of course her or his terminal was working, and almost always the person was gracious about taking time out to help a fellow employee.
This time, when I gave the Social Security number for Wernle, the agent told me his tax returns for the most recent two years available on their system showed no reportable income.
Well, that figured—in one sense, at least. I already knew his Social Security records showed no earned income. Now the IRS was offering confirmation.
An FBI agent who paid no Social Security and no income taxes… yet routinely had thousands of dollars passing through his bank accounts. What was that about?
How does that old line go, something like, “The only things certain in life are death and taxes”? It was beginning to sound as if, for an FBI agent, the part about taxes didn’t apply.
I tried to call Eric and found that his new line wasn’t working any longer. I tried his second line; same story.
A social-engineering call to the rental office in his building produced the information that he had moved out. No, he hadn’t moved to a different apartment in the same complex, like the previous time—he had moved out completely. The rental lady looked up his information for me, but as I suspected, he had not left a forwarding address.
Back to DWP Special Desk once again. This was a long shot, but a place to begin. I asked the clerk to look up any new service for last name Wernle. It took her only a moment. “Yes,” she said. “I have a new account for Joseph Wernle,” and she gave me an address on McCadden Place, in Hollywood.
I couldn’t believe the Feds were lamebrained enough to keep using the same name on the public utilities accounts for a guy they were trying to hide.
I had Eric’s pager number. That number still worked, and it told me which pager company was providing him with service. I called and tricked an account rep into revealing the specific number that made Eric’s pager distinct from every other: its CAP (“Channel Access Protocol”) code. Then I went out and bought a pager from the same company, telling the clerk that I’d dropped my previous one in the toilet while I was peeing. He laughed sympathetically—he’d obviously heard the story