{TAP Logo} MAR-APRIL 1977 No. 43 {In medeival gothic-style letters: } Report From Merrie Olde England There is very little credit card fraud here, since some years ago numbers corresponding to actual phone numbers were abandoned. It used to be an amalgam of your number. Now the number must fit into a secret matrix only operators have. Thus fraud comes about only by people amalgamating two or more numbers using bits of each to form a "good" one. If you are off by just one digit, they know immediately and tell you so. All UK CCs start 44K which I think is international - the country code, then a "year" letter. US now is 1K, right? I have tried to figure out this matrix number but to no avail. Here are some examples of cards that are billed to the same phone number. Do not use or reveal them, D E L E T E D but if you have some budding genius who would like to see if he can devise the matrix, then let him. I think it would be far too expensive to equip each operator console with a computer validation all at once, so this is probably the forthcoming US system. Has anyone had any experience of any comeback by security or anyone else as a result of making phony international calls using phony CCs? When making international calls here, you call operator (100) who first checks to see that you are not on a pay phone and possibly verify your number as busy, then she calls the international operator and clicks off. International then takes your number and calls you back after setting up the call. So if you are at a center remote to her, she cannot verify your phone's status. If you had the # to call international direct, you could do it from a pay phone safely and have her think it is a domestic phone. If you had these numbers then, they could be rather useful; certainly here, possibly in the US, too. [typical British understatement] When using fake CCs, some people in UK go to a pay phone, lift receiver (this gives you dial tone immediately here), dial any digit and leave the receiver off its rest. Then they go to another pay phone, preferably some distance away but from which they can see the first one. Make the call, and when the operator asks for your number (which they always do here), give her the number of the other box. If they check, they get busy tone - even if they check on their special interior phone circuits, they get the right condition, i.e., someone waiting on the line. If the Feds come, you have a grandstand view from a safe distance. If the operator is going to call the Feds, she may: 1. Spend an abnormally long time putting you through. 2. Give you a ringing tone, the sort that never gets answered, to keep you there as long as possible. Try #KP04412468072ST for a recorded description of clap symptoms. The London (01) 246 xxxx exchange is the equivalent of Big Apple's 999 exchange. Do you have any interesting 999 #s? I only know Dial-a-Joke. If you have 1DDD then (44)12468015 and 8017 are not souped. They are only continental and US tones demo, tho. When travelling from UK to Germany take plenty of shillings - 5p pieces (worth 8½) work as 1 DM (worth 50½) in German slot machines. M E T E R J U M P I N G In order to avoid breaking any seals or disturbing of meters, as well as having a system that can be removed immediately when the power man calls, some UK power freaks do the following: Two neon screwdrivers are inserted where wires run in and wiggled about until they light. Copper wire on crocodile clips is run between them. The methods you have shown make getting caught too easy. I'll be sending you what I have on computer crime. PDP - 10 operator only commands would be very useful, please. I could send passwords, etc. but unless you had CCITT vol. 24 (or 21, not sure) modems, it would be of little use to you. T H E S I L V E R B O X The "Silver Box" referred to by one of your correspondents is a 2280Hz tone interrupted at dial pulse speed (signalling system AC9). I imagine 2600 pulsing is used in the same way. I sent you articles on how. SF generators are so much easier to build, it's a pity you've not published more about them. Here the problem is that you need the secret internal P.O. trunk routings, which are completely different for each exchange. So either you need your local operator as a girl fiend, or you randomly dial bleeps and ask people their number and build up lists that way. One question more: In UK about 50% of coin boxes (pay phones) can be used to make ISD - International Subscriber Dialing - to the rest of Europe. The boxes can't handle the high metering rate to US. So if the machine would let you, they would be free. How then does the automatic international equipment validate and discriminate between pay phones and domestic phones (which I can call US direct)? I thought the most likely answer is that the off hook resistance of pay phones is different and can be measured automatically. If so, would payphone or domestic phone resistance be higher? I realise I'm talking about foreign equipment, but any thoughts you have on this would be appreciated. You think Bell smells, well the PO stinks to high heaven! Calls over 30 miles [aren't you metric yet?] midmorning are œ2 (about $3.20) for ten minutes. Also 200 bits/minute [illegible] rental œ100 per annum, weight 20 lbs, and are based on 20 year old technology. All international charges are at least twice to three times higher as other countries. No "foreign" attachments are allowed at all (except answering machines). Complete and total monopoly on all forms of communication, even carrier pigeons and modulated light. No CB, and to be a Ham you need to be a fucking electronics genius, and then there are so many restrictions, it isn't worth it. Celebrate your independence! You're right about this being a Police State. You can't even breathe without permission from our Communist government. Police here can search anyone or any premises on whom or in which they "suspect" drugs, which gives them carte blanche. The laws on currency exchange control are not even published. You can't even find out what they are; you can only get a "Yes" or "No" answer from the Treasury. You're right; phones aren't everything. Thanks for the libertarian stuff, it's exactly what I'm into politically. Until now I thought I was unique (I probably am, here). There's only one thing a government should do for its people, only one social service, and that's to keep 'em free. I'd very much like to get that printed circuit layout. How's it coming? (See #41) Radio Shack are very good and deserve a plug (plug=mention, in case of language barrier. Oscar Wilde: "The English and Americans are separated by a common language") Would anyone want a standard English phone in exchange for ??? I doubt it - they're grotty (nasty). I have American, Austrian, German, Swedish and private system phones in my collection. Have you ever gone on holiday and thought of the true cost of it? Not only is there the cost of your holiday accommodation, but the continued cost of your own home. For a Briton like me to come to the US, it is ludicrously expensive. However, what I have in mind is a swap, for, say, three weeks next September. I have a very nice modern apartment on the South Coast near Brighton, which has everything and is the place to holiday. I would also like to swap cars, if possible. Mine is a 3.5 liter auto saloon, tho I don't mind what kind of car I get in return. Bomb throwing anarchists are requested to leave their bombs behind, as this is rather a conservative area. No more than three people. I would like in return, for my girlfriend and myself, anything similar in the Big Apple, or somewhere relatively near in NJ or even possibly Cleveland, OH or Montreal/Toronto. We'd have to negotiate about phones. Mine is permanently tapped - yes, I've made a lotta mistakes. You could retune a Blue Box to SSMF2 and use the call box opposite or credit cards to call the US. [It's a GREAT idea, and if anyone is interested, we'll forward your letters. We assume NO responsibility.] Enclosed are some photocopied articles from Undercurrents. They're a bit intellectual and heavy, and tend to reject Fone Fucking as not being "respectable" and what AT (Alternate Technology) is all about [YES! Undercurrents, 11 Shadwell, Uley, Dursley, Gloucestershire, England is $7.50 for 6 bimonthly issues, and don't ask for it for free. Things are rough enough over there. It is GREAT! The best thing to come out of England since..ah.. maybe the best thing ever to come out of England. It's what TAP -could- be like if we had enough people. Maybe we should send them our entire files and retire] Thanks for the -Esquire- article. The article gives the impression that the typical freak is a blind, spaced-out, Jewish homosexual. Another impression is that there is a hard core of super-techno-freaks who know everything there is to know, and who, quite rightly haven't publicised it - like you wouln't want everyone to know how to bring Bell to its knees. There is the same cadre here. Duncan Campbell is the most famous, a veteran from the trial some years ago which made the PO look like a bunch of dummies (which they are, of course). He's tied in with Undercurrents, for whom many other freaks work. They are also linked with B.I.T. - whom you know about. [BIT Alternative Information Exchange and Energy Center, 148 Great Western Road, London WII, England] The rest are mavericks working on their own - mostly PO operators with access to the AC9 translation codes, which are kept in a safe at each exchange, and which, of course, are different for each exchange. Killgore Trout mentions in #37 the boxes the military use, with the five extra buttons used presumably for different levels of priority and possibly "seizing" and rerouting calls in progress. Lemond and Fry say in -No Place to Hide- "...the bluebox could also have been used to intercept a phone call in progress." They do not explain this.. any ideas? Here is CCITT #5. Note the remarkable similarity to your own, with the addition of 11 and 12, all possible permutations of the six frequencies are used. Add one extra frequency and you get six more possibilities. All MF systems - SSMF2 (Western Europe's up and coming systems). Touch Tone frequencies, etc. follow the same pattern: when they need five extra numbers, they add one frequency spaced up the "same distance" from the others. 2100 is "disable echo suppressors". That makes a neat gap between 1700 and 2100 Hz - with 1900Hz, our magic Open Sesame frequencies. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to test 700 & 1900, 900 & 1900, 1100 & 1900, 1300 & 1900, 1500 and 1900, and perhaps even 1700 & 1900 (since 1700 is used as a control frequency anyway, used with our special control frequencies 1900 might be a super special control #). Where you insert these numbers, I don't know. Before KP, in conjunction with KP2, using the two of these special #s to unlock the system, this is anyone's guess. Best to practice calling calling a phone # you know to be busy with conversation or music on the line. If you hit it, whoopie! Sorry to close on a down note: The world is coming to an end, or very near it, beginning 1982, through to 1984 - nuclear war, all of America's seaboard cities and all of Europe destroyed. Both chemical and biological warfare, total economic chaos and starvation. No, I'm not a Jehovah's Whitness or a headcase. It's all there, in the heavens, ask any astrologist, or futurologist, or Bowie: "we got five years", or anyone. I suggest an Alaskan igloo and two years supply of everything. Depravo the Rat England is a bit further down the road to collapse than the US. I could list dozens of my favorite books about diasaster, but will settle for these: Asimov's Foundation trilogy, John Cristopher's -No Blade of Grass-, Pat Frank's -Alas, Babylon-, E. T. Tennyson's -The Time of The End-. "The Earth has become a rotten egg, held together by too many technological Band-Aids, and unless the vast majority of people vocalizes and expresses opposition and repulsion to the vulture-like desecration of our planet, then they will become the cannibal rabble of -Soylent Green- and the paranoid powerless of -1984-." Chris Barry in -The Aquarian-. After I saw the classic map of fallout patterns, I figured on retreating to the Siskiyou region (CA-OR border), but the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is in the vicinity. Buried there are more than 75 million gallons of radioactive wastes, which may be dangerous for up to 500,000 years, in tanks which may last only 25 years. Some are already leaking. And then there's Geophysical Warfare, described in the December Saga magazine. "Science-fiction weapons" like the "Stoneburner" of -Dune- and the "green lights" of -Day of the Triffids- actually exist, in the form of laser weapons. And then there are the ones we don't even know about! So I may follow Dr. Asimov's advice: Eat, Drink and Be Merry. JP POST SCRIPT Things are getting really heavy over here. Duncan Campbell - the guy most responsible for UC7 and the single most knowledgeable source in the UK has been busted and held without bail under Official Secrets charges (i.e. in no other country, other than the Red ones, would it be an offence). I don't know but I think he's been framed/set up by a special branch for revealing innocuous info about gov't communications HQ monitoring all international phone calls. "More arrests are expected." so everyone is going to have to go to ground, since anyone DC communicates to is also liable for two years inside. Hence I expect to see most of the Undercurrents crew, possibly B.I.T etc. hassled at least. It would be a nice touch to dedicate an issue to DC and Mark Hosenball, the latter now being deported. [Consider it dedicated] It's worth a thought that perhaps 80% of what TAP prints couldn't be printed here without making yourself liable to O.S. Act charges. Our P.O. trained receptionist tells me the following. Normally when someone comes in on the board, on auto boards anyway, she has no way of knowing where the call is coming from on that exchange. So if the caller places a call and gives a wrong own number, the P.O. pays. To guard against this, she "TKOs" onto the number she is given via another line. (Not quite true. The positions that are told to TKO each and every call rotate.) If she hears the sound of the exchange coming back to her, she knows it's ok. If she gets nothing, she checks the # out with the # clerk who tells her if the # given is part of a business multi-line setup or not. If isn't, she knows it's an invalid call - because on a single line she'd have been able to TKO on it. On a business # say 999-3010 with 10 lines, depending on the traffic on the private board the call giving the #999-3010 could be on any line 3010-{?} inclusive, so the operator won't check. Moral story: if you want to make free operator connected calls, give a # that is a business with a large PMBX or PABX in your exchange. DR ¸ Youth Hot Line Reports, Inc. 1977 - Do not make checks out to Youth Hot Line Reports, PLEASE! Movement groups may reprint without permission if TAP's address is given with all credits. Please send us a copy of reprinted work. WARNING: We will prosecute copyright violators.