An Ohio man has pleaded guilty to a federal conspiracy charge for being part of a gang of "swatters" -- one of them blind -- who used Caller ID spoofing to phone the police with fake hostage crises, sending armed cops bursting into the homes of innocent people.
Stuart Rosoff of Cleveland, Ohio (right, in a 2004 mugshot) pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy last Friday in federal court in the Northern District of Texas.
The case seems to confirm that swatters are using simple Caller ID spoofing to pull these unfunny hoaxes -- and not "hacking into 911" after all. But the court documents indicate that Rosoff was part of a remarkably sophisticated gang of old-school phone phreaks with serious access to at least one phone company's computers, which they used to get information on their targets.
The alleged brain behind of much of the phone hacking was a minor in Boston, identified in three separate guilty pleas from group members as "M.W." M.W. comes across as a master of social engineering, who had enough access to phone company systems to listen in on calls. He is also blind.
According to a stipulation (.pdf) by Rosoff and prosecutors, Rosoff worked with M.W. to obtain "telephone numbers, pass phrases, employee identification numbers, and employee account information used by the conspirators by various means including through 'social engineering' or pretexting of telephone calls to telecommunications company employees, 'war dialing', trafficking in pass phrases and access information with other phone 'phreakers,' etc."
M.W. allegedly made more that 50 telephone calls to the Verizon Provisioning Center in Irving, Texas, "and obtained unauthorized access to the computers located there, and used the access to obtain telecommunications services including Caller I.D. blocking and call forwarding."
Wanna give Caller-ID spoofing a go? Try these:
Telespoof.com, SpoofTech, SpoofTel, SpoofCard and Tricktel.
