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Verizon Tech Accused Of Making $220K In Sex Calls On User Lines
Joseph Vaccarelli, a former Verizon Technician, has been charged with racking up $220,000 in phone-sex calls by tapping into the land lines of nearly 950 customers. Authorities say that he made approximately 5,000 calls, resulting in 45,000 minutes of call time. Verizon estimated that out of a 40-week period, Vaccarelli spent 15 weeks talking on sex lines. How in the world do you have this much phone sex, period, but especially at work, and not have anyone notice?
You can have that much by either being very very good, or very very bad at it.
Yay, I have a sig.
"Can you hear me now?"
"Good!"
"No, Bad! Very very bad... You have been so very bad!"
Set up 900 premium phone service. ...
Get mate at Verizon to use customers phones to call said service.
Profit.
But I think most slashdot users won't get it, because they're not used to being on top of things, if you know what I mean.
A few years ago I turned down a job offer as a Verizon Technician due to low pay - I didn't know there were these kinds of fringe benefits!
SIG: TAKE OFF EVERY 'CAPTAIN'!!
I'd tell ya, but then you'd die of exhaustion.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Did he own part of the phone-sex companies. That would explain that it was just a way to steal money and hide it. Less exciting story though.
9 minute average....better than your average geek. ;)
Notwithstanding that I think a great number of users here think idle is a waste of space, a headline like this ought to be taken seriously, not treated as if it were a joke. This guy compromised the accounts of nearly a thousand customers, and that is a HUGE breach for Verizon's customers.
is that the explanation would cut into valuable phone-sex time.
I used to think a certain manager where I work had a bad stomach - he would often get up and say "back in 10 minutes". Evidently people in reception thought a certain secretary had a bad stomach too.
One day security installed a security camera in a stock room because they noticed that things "kept being moved around". Soon all became apparent.
All I can say is he may have lacked in duration but he made up in frequency!
He didnt compromise accounts, in the summary it says he tapped into land lines. That can be done with a $5 telephone handset and a pair of aligator clips, and was probably done using an actual linemans handset provided to him by the company. Google "beige box" for more info.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Presuming a 40 hr work week, that works out to be 1/3 of the year on phone sex lines.
That's pretty unbelievable, considering that one still needs time to jack into the lines in the first place.
I've done some slack things at work, and it's pretty easy to get distracted and find out you spent most of the day goofing off. But this would take a real concerted effort to not work.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Maybe he was in on the calls business. And he thought if those bills turn up the customers would be too embarressed to compain.
Imagine how many divorces that guy most have caused.
How would you explain such a bill to your significant other and how would they react?
He should have tapped in somewhere later in the system, so his calls wouldn't get charged to a customer. But hey, maybe he wanted to get caught.
Also I wish to complain about this sentence from the summary. This sentence should be taken outside and shot:
It's a bad idea to start spelling out your punctuation. As you can see in the above sentence, the author has ended up with the word "period' surrounded by commas. "Period" is supposed to end a sentence. And it is supposed to be written as "." not spelled out with letters. Spelling out "period" in the middle of a sentence, and surrounding it with commas, is madness exclamation mark. See question mark? It's stupid. Please don't spell out the word "period", use the popular abbreviation: .
Technical wise. It is as simple as driving up to a cabinet, cracking open a pit or walking into an MDF/IDF room, finding a pair that has tone and dialing. If that one doesn't work, go to the next pair.
I used to make calls on customers lines all the time but never anything that would cause them to get billed (local calls for support, cable pair information, etc).
This guy wasn't after 45,000 minutes of phone sex. Don't be surprised if soon a follow-up article appears explaining he actually operated some of those lines himself, or is in another way affiliated.
He got caught after 40 weeks, or almost 10 months of it. During which he spent 15/40 = 37.5% of his time talking to sex lines.
So maybe the question "why didn't he get caught?" is technically wrong, it practically begs for the question, "why did it take them so long?"
I mean, seriously, is stuff like, "hur hur hur, I want to pull down your panties and stick it in your ass" something you'd normally hear around the office when people are talking on the phone? Well, I guess I've had worse tech support before, but never that explicit ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You'd think with all those people in "the network" following him while he was doing this, he'd get stage fright or someone would have said "I can SEE you now!"
At a previous job I had access to telephone exchanges. DSLAM firmware updates can easily take an hour or two and my diagnostic equipment included a telephone headset with a bix clip adapter.
Given that I was alone most of the time, there are thousands of lines going into the rooms I worked in and the competition left their panels out in the open I can completely see how someone with less of a moral backbone could have caused a lot of trouble without getting caught.
Someone working for the telco itself would have access to hundreds of thousands of lines.
butt set ...
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
Hm. One hand holding the handset. One hand holding onto the telephone pole.
Yep, you're doing it wrong.
That's why it took him so long. Try substituting a dry-hump on a telephone pole for your hand-of-preference. It takes much longer.
Um... At least that's what I've heard...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.