37 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
37 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
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San Jose Mercury News, Thursday morning, October 5, 1989
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"COPS GOT HIS NUMBER"
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"Teen accused of harassment calls via computer"
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The 16-year-old computer enthusiast loved to call people on the telephone
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and speaking through a voice synthesizer, talked like the devil. Over
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time, the boy harassed police departments from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to
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Hayward, and managed to rack up an estimated $170,000 in illegal calls,
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authorities said. In one day last year, the Los Angeles-area youth, whom
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police would not identify by his real name, made 67 calls to the Hayward
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Police Department. And in a Los Angeles County town, dispatchers were
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distracted durning several emergencies one evening while they answered his
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crank calls for five hours. But try as they might, neither law
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enforcement officials nor an investigator at one telephone company that
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was paying the bills could figure out who was doing it. "He was, to be
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frank about it, a pain in the ass," said Stan McClurg, a Cedar Rapids
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detective." "He would call people and simply harass them." Then in
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early March, Kent, as he liked to call himself, spent five hours chatting
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with dispatchers at the Hayward Police Department. It was long enough
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for authorities to trace the call all the way to his home in San Gabriel.
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When police arrived that night, they found the teen-ager in bed with his
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Commodore 64, talking on the telephone. Police say they can prove the
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youth made about $2000 worth of fraudulent calls. When he is arraigned
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Oct, 16 he will be charged with fraud and making two harrassing phone
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calls, four bomb threats and interfering with the Hayward Police and Los
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Angeles Sheriff's Departments. Sgt. Kammer of the Los Angeles Sheriffs
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Department said the boy probably got the long-distance calling codes from
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a computer bulletin board, along with numbers that would get him into the
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phone mail systems of large companies. such as Sears Roebuck. Once
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inside, he ran thousands of combinations of numbers through his computer,
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leaving it on all day while he was away at school, police said. When he
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hit on codes that would get him into employees phone mail, he would
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retrieve their messages and leave devilish ones of his own. "The kid
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was very, very bright kid, and he was very bored," Kammer said. "He sat
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up all night doing these things."
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