Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled Fry Guy to bootstrap his
way up to a new form of wire-fraud. First, he'd snitched credit card
numbers from credit-company computers. The data he copied included
names, addresses and phone numbers of the random card-holders.

Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up Western Union and
asked for a cash advance on "his" credit card. Western Union, as a
security guarantee, would call the customer back, at home, to verify
the transaction.

But, just as he had switched the Florida probation office to "Tina" in
New York, Fry Guy switched the card-holder's number to a local
pay-phone. There he would lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing
and re-routing the call, through switches as far away as Canada. When
the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer," or con, the
Western Union people, pretending to be the legitimate card-holder.
Since he'd answered the proper phone number, the deception was not very
hard. Western Union's money was then shipped to a confederate of Fry
Guy's in his home town in Indiana.

Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand
dollars from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989. They
also dabbled in ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-fraud.
Fry Guy was intoxicated with success. The sixteen-year-old fantasized
wildly to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off money to hire
himself a big limousine, and had driven out-of-state with a groupie
from his favorite heavy-metal band, Motley Crue.

Armed with knowledge, power, and a gratifying stream of free money, Fry
Guy now took it upon himself to call local representatives of Indiana
Bell security, to brag, boast, strut, and utter tormenting warnings
that his powerful friends in the notorious Legion of Doom could crash
the national telephone network. Fry Guy even named a date for the
scheme: the Fourth of July, a national holiday.

This egregious example of the begging-for-arrest syndrome was shortly
followed by Fry Guy's arrest. After the Indiana telephone company
figured out who he was, the Secret Service had DNRs--Dialed Number
Recorders--installed on his home phone lines. These devices are not
taps, and can't record the substance of phone calls, but they do record
the phone numbers of all calls going in and out. Tracing these numbers
showed Fry Guy's long-distance code fraud, his extensive ties to pirate
bulletin boards,