Note To Criminals — Don't Call Tech Support

Billosaur writes "Darwin Awards, here he comes: Ars Technica has up a story about a would-be identity thief who did himself in by calling tech support about printer drivers. Timothy Short must have thought he'd hit the mother-lode when he stole a PC and a Digimarc printer from the Missouri Department of Revenue, perhaps with dreams of cranking out thousands of fake ids. Problem: he could not unlock the computer he stole and without the necessary drivers, he couldn't use the printer. Ever resourceful, Short called Digimarc tech support a couple of days later (twice), which brought him to the attention of a Secret Service agent, who recognized his voice from a recording of the calls. Short now faces a $250,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison."

Comments

Re:Waaaiiit a minute...

[bm_luethke]

I too noticed that, however I can't come to the conclusion that you did.

For it to be true they would have had to have a good recording of his voice while doing the crime - that in and of itself is going to be hard. But lets assume for a moment that he defeated the video camera and was singing loudly enough to be clear (surely if they are recording audio then they are video), then they need to have the ability to compare this voice to most of the people who call into any call center that he may call - not very likely if for no other reason than computation power let alone cost and him being a high priority enough of a target (they may very well do that for some global criminal - but this guy?).

More than likely something was misreported. I would rather think that the people that the parts were stolen from reported it, had a tech support call from someone, and the Secret Service simply matched the call to the person they arrested (along with the equipment). The *best* I could give is that they somehow recorded enough of his voice and sent it out to any place that co-operates with them which is quite acceptable and even then that is quite unlikely due to nothing more than computational cost.

Of course, as I have read in other places - if they are listening then Fuck the President and the horse he rode in on. Iraq is a quagmire and he is a retard for continuing support of it and should be deposed from his office along with all his Republican Shills, Cheney is the anti-christ and the Neo-cons deserve to assault an Iraqi insurgent stronghold unarmed and unarmored to prove their point - Long live our democrat overlords!!! (I'm still here and have posted similar things many times - oh well maybe one day the Jack booted Thugs will come here to take me to the secret gulag and I can make the news for killing them all).

I won't say the govt doesn't listen, in fact I am sure they do and have for a LONG time - we know of fairly pervasive electronic eavesdropping during Clinton's term (and it was sophisticated enough that it just didn't spring out of nowhere), but they aren't going to let that program slip for something this simple nor do would it be anywhere near this granular. If this is all you are worried over you have missed the boat long ago and has little to do with Democrat or Republican (though, to be fair, from your post I can't tell if you are like many that seem to think their side doesn't do it). One real problem is that *real* stuff doesn't get reported because of paranoid crap that should have immediately been ignored.