Read Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker for Free Online

in the years ahead the DMV would be a rich lode that I would use in myriad ways.
    All these extra tools I was accumulating were like the sweet at the end of a meal. The main course was still my phone phreaking. I was calling a lot of different Pacific Telephone and General Telephone departments, collecting information to satisfy that “What information can Iget?” urge, making calls to build my knowledge bank of the companies’ departments, procedures, and lingo and routing my calls through some long-distance carriers to make them harder to trace. Most of this from my mom’s phone in our condominium.
    Of course phreakers like to score points by showing other phreakers what new things they’ve learned how to do. I loved pulling pranks on friends, phreakers or not. One day I hacked into the phone company switch serving the area where my buddy Steve Rhoades lived with his grandmother, changing the “line class code” from residential to pay phone. When he or his grandmother tried to place a call, they would hear, “Please deposit ten cents.” Of course he knew who had done it, and called to complain. I promised to undo it, and I did, but changed the service to a prison pay phone. Now when they tried to make a call, an operator would come on the line and say, “This will be a collect call. What is your name, please.” Steve called to say, “Very funny—change it back.” I had my laughs; I changed it back.
    Phone phreakers had discovered a way to make free phone calls, taking advantage of a flaw in some types of “diverters”—devices that were used to provide call forwarding (for example, to an answering service) in the days before call forwarding was offered by the phone companies. A phreaker would call at an hour when he knew the business would be closed. When the answering service picked up, he would ask something like, “What hours are you open?” When the person who had answered disconnected the line, the phreaker would stay on; after a few moments, the dial tone would be heard. The phreaker could then dial a call to anywhere in the world, free—with the charges going to the business.
    The diverter could also be used to receive incoming calls for call-backs during a social-engineering attack.
    In another approach with the diverter, the phreaker dialed the “automatic number identification,” or ANI number, used by phone company technicians, and in this way learned the phone number for the outgoing diverter line. Once the number was known, the phreaker could give out the number as “his” callback. To answer the line, the phreaker just called the business’s main number that diverted the call. But this time, when the diverter picked up the second line to call the answering service, it effectively answered the incoming call.
    I used this way of talking with my friend Steve late one night. He answered using the diverter line belonging to a company called Prestige Coffee Shop in the San Fernando Valley.
    We were talking about phone phreaking stuff when suddenly a voice interrupted our conversation.
    “We are monitoring,” the stranger said.
    Steve and I both hung up immediately. We got back on a direct connection, laughing at the telephone company’s puny attempt to scare us, talking about what idiots the people who worked there were. The same voice interrupted again:
“We are still monitoring!”
    Who were the idiots now?
    Sometime later, my mom received a letter from General Telephone, followed by an in-person visit from Don Moody, the head of Security for the company, who warned her that if I didn’t stop what I was doing, GTE would terminate our telephone service for fraud and abuse. Mom was shocked and upset by the idea of losing our phone service. And Moody wasn’t kidding. When I continued my phreaking, GTE did terminate our service. I told my mom not to worry, I had an idea.
    The phone company associated each phone line with a specific address. Our terminated phone was assigned to Unit 13.