The Case of the Digital Deception

by Ellie O'Ryan

  “Ah, my favorite club,” Miss Hodges said cheerfully. “What can I do for you?”

  Hannah, Ben, and Corey scanned the room just to make sure they were the only students inside. After all, Dancer99 could be anyone.

  “We have a new case,” Ben explained. “But we’ve kind of hit a wall and don’t know what to try next.”

  Miss Hodges put down her pen. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  Club CSI recapped their investigation into the hacking of Whitney’s You Can Draw It! account.

  “So our theory is that Dancer99 hacked the account and bought the upgrades . . . but we’re not sure how to prove it,” Ben finished.

  “And even though Whitney’s parents have opened a fraud claim with the credit card company, and won’t be responsible for the charges, we still want to find out who did it,” Hannah added. “If we can, I mean.”

  “Of course you do,” Miss Hodges said. “I want to know too! Your investigation falls under an exciting branch of forensic science called digital forensics.”

  “Really? It has its own field and everything?” asked Corey.

  “Yes. Unfortunately, there’re plenty of crimes in cyberspace,” Miss Hodges said. “Account hacking, identity theft, unauthorized credit card usage, stolen personal information, digital espionage. Everyone from individual citizens to major corporations to governments around the globe must be aware of the threat that cyber criminals pose. And the best ones often leave no trail, making them even harder to track. But that doesn’t sound like what you’ve already discovered about this Dancer99.”

  Miss Hodges paused as she reached into her bag for her cell phone. “I don’t know enough about digital forensics to help you figure out your next steps, but my friend Mitch Carlton might,” she continued. “He’s a web developer and an online gaming expert. Are you free after school today? I’ll text Mitch to see if he can come by and advise you.”

  “Yes, absolutely!” Ben replied right away.

  Club CSI waited quietly while Miss Hodges sent the text to Mr. Carlton. “We should hear back from him pretty quickly,” Miss Hodges said. “He’s basically online twenty-four hours a—”

  Bzzzz! Miss Hodges grinned. “Right on time!” she said. Then she read the text aloud. “ ‘Sounds interesting. I’ll be there at three o’clock. MC.’ ”

  “Cool!” Corey cheered. “So should we meet you here after school?”

  “I’ll have to sign Mitch in at the office,” Miss Hodges said. “So let’s meet at the computer lab instead. See you after school!”

  “Thanks, Miss Hodges,” said Ben, and then he turned around to walk to the cafeteria with Hannah and Corey. But only Hannah was there.

  “I guess Corey couldn’t wait any longer for lunch,” Hannah said with a smile.

  After school, Club CSI staked out a computer in the back corner of the lab. When Miss Hodges appeared in the doorway, Hannah waved to catch her attention. Miss Hodges was followed by a man whose black hair was slicked back into a short ponytail. He wore a large badge around his neck that read WOODLANDS JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL: VISITOR.

  “Oh, here they are,” Miss Hodges said to Mr. Carlton. “Mitch, this is Ben, Corey, and Hannah, the founding members of Club CSI. Everyone, this is Mr. Carlton.”

  “Hey, Club CSI,” Mr. Carlton said. He pulled a chair over to the computer station and turned it around so that he was sitting on it backward. “Miss Hodges told me so many great things about you guys and your club. It’s nice to meet you!”

  “I told Mr. Carlton everything about the case, so he’s completely up to speed,” Miss Hodges continued as she rolled another chair over to their computer station. “Take it away!”

  “Our big challenge right now is figuring out who is the person behind a particular username, Mr. Carlton,” Ben said. “We’re pretty sure that Dancer99 is the one who purchased the expansion packs. But unless we can find out who Dancer99 really is, we’ve reached a dead end.”

  “Is that something you know how to do?” Corey asked hopefully. “Find out the real identity behind an online one?”

  Mr. Carlton shook his head. “Look, sometimes it can be done,” he replied. “Especially by law officers after a crime has been committed—but even they need a court order. But for civilians like us, that kind of hacking would just result in more laws being broken—if we could even get through the security protections on a game like You Can Draw It!”

  “What do you mean by that—‘security protections’?” Hannah asked.

  “Commercial websites for gaming companies, or shopping sites, use complicated codes to encrypt their users’ personal information,” Mr. Carlton explained. “If a site is hacked and that information is stolen, people will be less likely to visit the site. So, these companies spend a lot of time and money doing everything they can to prevent hacking.”

  “So that makes it more likely that whoever hacked Whitney’s account already knew her password,” Ben said.

  Mr. Carlton nodded. “When a professional hacker breaks into a site, they will steal tons of data,” he said. “Thousands of users’ personal information, credit card numbers, passwords—that sort of thing. Then the hacker can sell it to other criminals. So it usually becomes a big news story, and at the very least, the company that was hacked will send an e-mail to its users urging them to change their passwords and monitor their accounts. And I haven’t heard of any wide-scale hacking of You Can Draw It!”

  “Mr. Carlton would know,” Miss Hodges spoke up. “He’s one of the moderators on Hacker Tracker, a blog and message board that reports Internet crimes.”

  “Okay . . . ,” Hannah said slowly. “If there’s no way to figure out who Dancer99 really is, what next? Is this the end of our investigation? Because I don’t really think we can get court orders or anything.”

  Mr. Carlton tapped his fingers on the desk as he thought about it. “There might be one other option,” he finally said. “You know when Dancer99 was logging on to Whitney’s account, right?”

  “Yeah,” Corey said.

  “So maybe we can find out where Dancer99 was logging on,” Mr. Carlton said. “You see, each computer has a unique identifier called an—”

  “IP address!” Club CSI exclaimed all at once. Everyone laughed. Mr. Carlton looked impressed.

  “Told you they were smart,” Miss Hodges said proudly.

  “So you can do that?” Ben asked Mr. Carlton. “You can find the IP addresses for where a game was played? I knew you could do it for e-mails, sometimes—but not for game play.”

  “Let’s log on and see,” Mr. Carlton suggested. “Except we do need to log on to Whitney’s account. Will she give us permission to do that?”

  “Let me text her,” Hannah said as she reached for her cell phone. “Hopefully we can reach her before cheerleading practice starts. I know that Regionals is tomorrow.”

  Hannah’s phone beeped almost immediately, and Hannah looked up from her phone with a big smile. “Whitney’s cool with us accessing her account, and she just sent her log-on info, too.”

  Hannah typed Whitney’s username and password into the You Can Draw It! sign-in screen. Then she turned to Mr. Carlton. “Where will we find the IP addresses of her last log-ons?”

  “Click on Account Settings,” Mr. Carlton instructed. “Then User Controls. Then Privacy. Okay, click the little box next to ‘Allow me to access account history.’ Good. Now go back to Account Settings.”

  “Look,” Ben said, pointing at the screen. “There’s a new option there: History.”

  “Exactly!” Mr. Carlton replied.

  “That was kind of complicated to find,” Corey said. “How did you even know about it?”

  Mr. Carlton smiled. “One of my friends helped design You Can Draw It!,” he explained. “I know he likes to embed lots of special features into the user controls—in case anyone needs it. So I shot him an e-mail after Miss Hodges texted me and he explained how to do this.”

  “Wow! That’s really cool that you know th
e creator of You Can Draw It!” gushed Corey. “Is he judging the contest?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mitch. “But I’m sure he’ll have something to do with it. He feels really proud that his game is inspiring so much creativity.”

  “Go on, Hannah,” Ben encouraged her. “Click History.”

  When Hannah did, a new screen popped up immediately. It included the date and time of every log-on . . . and the IP address for each one!

  Ben frowned at the screen. “Log-on number one and log-on number twelve have the same IP address,” he said. “That must be Whitney’s laptop. “And log-on number thirteen is now—so that’s the school computer’s IP address. But the other ten IP addresses look really, really familiar.”

  “Well, yeah,” Corey said. “They’re practically the same, except for a couple digits.”

  “All those computers are on the same network, then,” Mr. Carlton said. “Like in the computer lab here—each computer has a unique IP address, but they’ll be very similar since they’re connected to one network.”

  “No . . . ,” Ben said slowly. “The similarity . . . It’s more than that.”

  “Let’s plot them on a map,” Mr. Carlton suggested.

  Hannah opened a new window and typed in the URL for the website that mapped IP addresses. Then she pasted in the IP address from the first hacking of Whitney’s account, which had happened at 5:09 p.m. on Wednesday, April 4.

  “Twelve-fifty Oak Street!” she exclaimed. “That’s the new branch of the library!”

  “That’s it!” Ben exclaimed. He dug around in his backpack and pulled out his evidence folder for the case. He showed everyone a crumpled piece of paper: the printout of the e-mail Alyssa sent to herself from Whitney’s account. “That’s why I recognized the IP address . . . . It’s identical to the one where Alyssa hacked into Whitney’s e-mail and sent that fake message.”

  “So the same computer was used for both crimes, on the same day . . . ,” Corey began.

  “Just thirteen minutes apart,” Hannah realized as she checked the e-mail’s time stamp. “So if Alyssa was using that computer to hack Whitney’s e-mail . . . and then, thirteen minutes later, Dancer99 used the same computer to hack Whitney’s You Can Draw It! account and charge the expansion packs . . . ”

  “Then it looks like we’ve found our suspect,” Corey finished for her.

  Chapter 13

  On a beautiful springtime Saturday, school was the last place Club CSI wanted to be—but they didn’t want to wait until Monday to interview Alyssa again. So they went up to the top of the bleachers during the Regionals cheerleading competition, watching cheerleaders from each school show off their best moves for the judges. Right now, Woodlands Junior High was up and Corey, Ben, and Hannah couldn’t believe how athletic their cheerleading squad was, especially Whitney.

  “Wow, did you see Whitney’s back flip?” Hannah asked. “That was awesome! I never knew that she was so good at gymnastics.”

  “Yeah, Alyssa’s pretty good too,” added Corey. “A pretty good liar. It’s hard to believe, especially when she came clean before about going into Whitney’s e-mail.”

  “It is creepy to think she could look us straight in the eye and lie like that,” Hannah said. She squinted in the bright sunlight.

  “Hey, Alyssa’s still only a suspect,” Ben reminded his friends. “Innocent until proven guilty, right? I know the evidence looks bad, but there’s still a possibility she didn’t do it.”

  “Definitely,” Corey agreed. “And maybe when she knows what we know—I mean, she knows it already, obviously, she was the one using that computer—but when she knows how much we know, then maybe she’ll tell the truth. That’s how it happened with the e-mail before. As soon as Alyssa realized what we had figured out—”

  “She confessed everything,” Hannah interrupted as the Woodlands team finished competing. “I think they’re going to present trophies as soon as the judges tally the scores, but let’s go hang out by the locker room. I don’t want to miss Alyssa.”

  “Er . . . no, thanks,” Corey said. “Everyone will think Ben and I are freak shows if we’re lurking around the locker room after the cheerleading competition.”

  “Fine.” Hannah sighed. “I’ll go wait there and bring Alyssa back to the bleachers so we can all interview her.”

  It took more than half an hour for the trophies to be awarded—Woodlands Junior High took second place—but eventually Hannah returned to the bleachers with Alyssa . . . and Whitney. Ben raised his eyebrows. He hadn’t expected to question Alyssa with Whitney around.

  “I know,” Hannah said right away. “But Whitney insisted. She said—”

  “I said it’s my case and my account, so whatever you have to say to Alyssa, you can say to me too,” Whitney interrupted. “Now let’s get on with it because we’re missing out on the celebration.”

  Club CSI could tell from Whitney’s tone of voice that she meant it. If they wanted to question Alyssa at all, they would have to do it in front of Whitney—like it or not.

  Corey patted a spot on the bleacher next to him. “Want to sit?” he asked Alyssa. She looked at him suspiciously, then perched on the edge of the bench.

  “So . . . you guys want to talk to me about something?” Alyssa said. She sounded a little nervous. “I already told you that I didn’t go into Whitney’s You Can Draw It! account. And I definitely didn’t make those purchases.”

  “But somebody did,” Corey replied. “And whoever hacked into Whitney’s account did it from the same computer where you sent the fake e-mail . . . just a few minutes afterward.”

  “And I’m telling you it wasn’t me,” Alyssa said firmly. “I’ll say it again and again and again. I don’t care. I swear I’m telling the truth. I’ve never played You Can Draw It! in my whole life, and I definitely didn’t log in using Whitney’s account. I don’t even know her username!”

  “Okay,” Hannah said. “We hear you. But how do you explain it that the game hacker just happened to be using the same computer at almost exactly the same time you were?”

  Alyssa glared at Hannah. “I don’t know. Lots of people use those computers. Besides, how do we even know you’re telling the truth? Maybe you can’t solve the crime, so you’re trying to blame me!”

  Ben placed the fake e-mail and a printout of the game log-ons on the bench. “We’re not making this up, Alyssa,” he said calmly. “You can look at the IP addresses and time stamps yourself.”

  Alyssa grabbed both pages and held them in front of her face, hiding her expression from Club CSI and Whitney. When she finally lowered the pages, a triumphant smile flickered across her mouth.

  “Guess what? I have an alibi,” she said. “My mom. In fact, she’s here in the gym right now. If you want to go talk to her, that’s fine with me. In fact, I think you should.”

  “We already talked to your mom,” Corey said. “She told us you like to use the library computers after school while she finishes her work.”

  “Exactly. And my mom gets off work at five!” Alyssa announced. “So by 5:09, when somebody hacked the You Can Draw It! account, we were already on our way home!”

  Club CSI exchanged a glance. That was not what they had expected to hear.

  “I mean it,” Alyssa said. “Please—come talk to my mom. She’s out the door at five o’clock exactly, so she can get dinner ready by the time my brothers get home. I actually remember that day . . . . She was bugging me to get off the computer because she wanted to leave already.”

  Corey observed Alyssa closely while she spoke. She didn’t fidget, stammer, or show any signs that she was lying—not once.

  “I believe you,” Corey said.

  Hannah and Ben quickly nodded.

  “But you’ve got to help us, Alyssa,” Corey continued. “You were probably at the library at the same time as the thief. Did you see anyone hanging around? Was there anybody waiting for a computer?”

  “That is soooo freaky,” Whitney said with a shiver
. “Whoever stole those upgrades on my parents’ credit card might have been right next to you!”

  “I don’t know,” Alyssa said. “I honestly can’t remember. I was too busy writing that stupid e-mail. I wish I’d never even sent it.”

  Suddenly, Corey’s eyes went wide. “Did you log out?” he asked urgently. “After you sent that e-mail from Whitney’s account? Did you log out?”

  Alyssa paused to think about it. “No, but I didn’t have to,” she said. “I just closed the Internet window, and that logs you out of your e-mail.”

  Everyone stared at Alyssa blankly.

  “You know,” she tried to explain. “It’s part of e-mail. When you close the Internet, the system automatically logs you out.”

  “Mine doesn’t work that way,” Hannah said. “Whenever I open a new Internet window, I’m still logged in. What e-mail program do you use?”

  “We-Mail,” Alyssa answered.

  “But my e-mail is through SmartMail,” Whitney said. “You have to manually log off.”

  “Oh,” Alyssa said in a quiet voice. “I didn’t know that.”

  “So Whitney’s account was still active after Alyssa left the library,” Ben concluded. “Whoever used that computer next—Dancer99, if we’re right—would have opened the Internet and found Whitney’s e-mail just sitting there. And she could have read all of Whitney’s old e-mails.”

  “And I had that one!” Whitney exclaimed. “The one that You Can Draw It! sent me after I registered! It had my username and my password in it!”

  “That’s it!” Corey exclaimed. “That’s how the thief got access to your account!”

  “So we’ve figured out the how,” Ben said. “And we already know the why—the prize money. But we still need to figure out the who. Who is Dancer99?”

  Everyone was quiet for a long moment. Then Alyssa spoke. “Did you check the sign-in books?”

  “Which sign-in books?” Ben asked.

  “At the library, you have to sign in before you can use the computers,” she explained. “No exceptions—even I have to sign in. So whoever used the computer right after me must’ve signed in too.”