Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey

by Oliver Markus

  After a few months, my class went on a school trip to Trier, another old Roman city, a few hundred miles away from Aachen. We were supposed to go explore the ancient downtown area on our own, without adult supervision. But it was raining, so I decided to hang out in the computer section of a department store instead. I played some of the video games I had cracked, and caught the attention of some local kids.

  Cracking groups back then used to put their own little intro or cracktro in front of a cracked game. It's similar to the 20th Century Fox or Universal logo you see at the beginning of a movie. That was our way of getting famous. Cracktros with our crew's name were basically high tech graffiti. Every time someone played a game we cracked, they had to look at our name first. That's really what it was all about. Not money. Just fame. Kinda like kids who spray graffiti on walls all over town, to spread their name.

  Anyway, the local kids in that department store recognized my hacking crew's name in front of the games I was playing. That was the first time I realized that I was getting famous in the hacking scene. People in cities hundreds of miles away knew my name. It was a pretty amazing feeling. As I found out later, it was addicting. At that department store in Trier, I ended up recruiting one of those local kids into my group that day, because he turned out to be an excellent programmer.

  As time went by, my crew grew larger. At first I had only recruited some of my classmates at school. But now we had grown so much, that we had members all over Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia and America. Everyone in the hacking scene knew us. We were at the very top of the game. Our cocky slogan was "Europe's #1." That didn't sit too well with some competing hacking crews. There was constant bickering between the various crews about who was the best. A bit like the east coast - west coast war in the hip hop scene. The more successful you were, the more haters talked trash about you. And we had a lot of haters. But our fans far outnumbered our enemies.

  Going to copy party gatherings was an amazing feeling. Everyone knew me and my crew. Everyone wanted to shake my hand or talk to me. I felt like a rockstar. I was literally world-famous. Among sceners anyway.

  In order to spread our cracks to as many people as possible, cracking crews used online bulletin board systems, or BBS for short. They were the precursors to Internet websites. Each crew had members that specialized in different aspects of hacking. Almost like different members in a drug gang have different jobs. Some cook the drug, some stand guard, some sell the product on the streets.

  In cracking crews back then, original suppliers provided the games through their connections at game stores or software companies. Crackers removed the copy protection of the games. Swappers exchanged floppy disks with the swappers of other crews. Spreaders uploaded the games to an online BBS to distribute the games as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. And leechers downloaded the latest cracks from other crews' BBS.

  But in order to connect to a BBS, our computers had to make calls over regular phone lines. And long distance calls were still very expensive back then. There were no unlimited calling plans yet. International calls were virtually unaffordable. So every elite crew had members called phreakers. They were the ones who provided the means to make free international phone calls to connect to a BBS on the other side of the globe. The real world needs oil to move wares around. The hacking scene back then needed ways to make free phone calls to move digital warez around.

  Usually phreakers got credit cards and passed them on to the spreaders, so they could use the cards to make expensive phone calls for free, to upload the latest cracked games to a bunch of boards online. Phreakers had several different ways to get their hands on credit cards. The most popular way was phishing. Basically the phreakers called a bunch of random numbers and tried to convince the people on the other end that they were talking to an employee of the fraud department of their credit card company.

  If the phreaker was good at his game, the person on the other end would give him all their personal information, their credit card, social security number, date of birth, etc. It's amazing how gullible people are when you use the right inflection in your voice. Random strangers will trust you very quickly, if you speak to them calmly, quietly, and with confidence.

  If you saw the movie Indentity Thief, you get the idea. Melissa McCarthy plays a phreaker who phishes Jason Bateman's identity, by convincing him that she works for the fraud department of his credit card.

  Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, once said: "A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things." A good hacker is a master manipulator. Some hackers are good at manipulating computer systems, others are good at manipulating brains.

  Nowadays identity theft is a billion dollar industry. Even organized crime, like the Russian mob, employ phreakers to steal credit cards and then the mob uses these cards to make online purchases. There is a black market online, where hackers buy and sell people's information.

  But back then, we weren't interested in making online purchases or selling people's ID to the mob. Crews back then just used the credit cards to make free phone calls around the world to spread their cracked games.

  The phone system in Europe was more advanced than the American phone system. Countries like Germany had switched to an all digital phone network long before the US did. And on digital lines, it was much easier for the authorities to find and trace hackers who abused credit cards to make calls. So European hackers called the free 800 numbers of American phone companies, and from those American lines called back to European lines with stolen credit cards. The American phone lines were still analog, and didn't allow the companies to trace the calls back. So European hackers became invisible by re-routing all their calls through America.

  But then at some point the US phone companies finally switched over to a digital network as well, and suddenly phreaking became a lot more dangerous. Hackers started getting arrested left and right. So more and more crews relied on a different way to make free phone calls, called "blue boxing." Instead of using someone else's credit card, hackers played a tone into the phone that had the exact same frequency as the tone the phone companies used to release a line for a free phone call. So, simply by playing that tone, you could suddenly make a free phone call to China or Europe.

  A phreaker who called himself Captain Crunch had discovered by accident, that the toy whistle that came in Captain Crunch serial boxes played exactly the right tone at exactly the right frequency to get a free phone line. He became a legend in the hacking scene.

  SEX AND CRIME

  "Any publicity is good publicity."

  Unknown

  Girls were rare in the hacking scene. I knew hundreds of guys in the scene, but there were only 3 or 4 girls. Two of them were famous because they ran popular online boards. And of course they hated each other and had cat fights online. Donna lived in New York, and her arch nemesis Tammy lived in California. Each one wanted to have the most important BBS, where the best crews uploaded their cracked games, or "warez" first.

  Back then, having "zero day warez" (brand new cracked games that are not even one day old yet) on your BBS first was a big status symbol. The competition between the crews and the BBS they favored was fierce. Whoever had the most "first releases" (cracking and spreading a new game before anyone else) was considered the best or most elite crew. Being part of the hacker elite was everything back then. Kids today think they sound cool when they spell everything wrong. That wasn't any different back then. The word elite for example was often spelled "leet" or "1337."

  If a hacking crew associated with the BBS of one of those 2 girls to spread their first release warez, they weren't really welcome on the other girl's BBS. Donna ran a very popular BBS that was frequented by many elite hackers from around the world. I decided to ask her to make her BBS in New York the exclusive headquarters for my European hacking crew, which meant we would upload al
l our warez on her BBS first. And then the leechers of other crews would have to come to her BBS to download our warez and upload them on other boards. It also meant that the hackers who were loyal to Tammy's board in California were now automatically our enemies.

  When I called Donna, we hit it off, and we ended up talking for hours. I started calling her every day. Suddenly talking to her seemed so much more important to me than my hacking crew. I lost any interest in games, or whether my group was the most elite crew with the most first releases. All that seemed so stupid and unimportant all of a sudden. The other guys in my crew started to notice that I had lost interest, and they began to call Donna my Yoko Ono. They felt Yoko was the reason why the Beatles broke up, and Donna was the reason why I lost interest in my crew. They were right.

  My crew had gotten so big, with members in so many different countries, that the different cells of the crew didn't even know each other or talk to each other. For example, the Scottish musicians and graphic artists never talked to the German crackers, and the Swedish programmers never talked to the Swiss original suppliers. I was the only link between all of them. I was the one who talked to everyone every day, and told everyone what needed to be done to work together as a team.

  I would ask the programmer in one country to make a new cracktro, and then ask the graphic artist in another country to draw the logo, and ask the musician in yet another country to compose a tune, and ask the cracker in yet another country to use that cracktro in front of his latest release, and then ask the spreaders in yet another country to ensure that the crack was being spread around the world.

  I was the backbone of the crew. Without me, nothing got done. So when I suddenly didn't call anyone in the crew anymore, and my line was always busy, because I was on the phone with Donna pretty much 24/7, things started to fall apart very quickly. My crew was suddenly a body without a head. My crew fragmented and different splinter cells joined up with other crews. But I didn't care. Donna was all I cared about.

  Donna and I had gotten so close, we literally never hung up the phone. There's a 6 hour time difference between New York and Germany, so when I got up in the morning to go to school, it was still the middle of the night in New York, and Donna was sleeping, but we were connected on the phone. When I got home after school, we were still connected and it was time for her to wake up and we said good morning to each other.

  The reason we never hung up and had a standing line was because at this time phreaking had become more and more difficult, because by now the phone network in the US was digital as well. It was getting harder and harder to get credit cards that lasted more than a day before they were shut down for abuse. And blue boxing was getting harder too, because the phone companies experimented with filters that blocked the tone hackers played into the phone to get free lines.

  It was an arms race between hackers and phone companies. Every time the phone companies made a change to stop blue boxing, hackers figured out the new frequencies and released new versions of their blue box software. So rather than hanging up and risking that we may never be able to get another free international line again, Donna and I decided to simply stay connected all the time.

  My parents started to wonder what I was doing in my room all the time, and who I kept taking to in English all day and night. They had every reason to be worried, because I had become so notorious as a hacker, that the German FBI had raided my parents' house twice.

  The first time the FBI had actually been looking for me. But I got off with a warning, because I was still under age, and there really weren't any laws against cyber crime yet, because hackers were so far ahead of law enforcement in terms of computer knowledge. A lot of the things hackers did back then were criminal but not technically illegal, because there were no laws against it yet.

  After that raid, I decided to be extra careful, and moved all my equipment and software to a friend's house down the road. From that point on, there was nothing in my room, or anywhere else in my parents' house, that could get me in trouble. Well, except the fact that I was on the phone with America nonstop. But my parents didn't know that yet.

  They were so pissed at me after the first raid, that they told me if I ever did anything illegal with computers again, they would kick me out and disown me. But being a rockstar among hackers was addicting. I couldn't imagine my life just being a regular teenager, without having people all over the world know my name. So even though I promised my parents I stopped, I didn't.

  After I moved all my stuff to my friend's house, I told my crew to spread the word that I, Goliath, had retired from the hacking scene and that I had opened a legitimate software company that was now going to produce video games. And that someone new, a hacker named Lucifer, was going to run my crew from now on.

  But the truth was, that the new hacker with the name Lucifer didn't actually exist. It was still me, just using a different name, instead of my old name Goliath. I liked the name Lucifer, not because I'm a satanist or devil worshipper, but because I thought it would be ironic, since the devil is also known as the Father of Lies or The Great Deceiver. And the existence of Lucifer the hacker was nothing more than a big lie.

  After a little while, the new me, Lucifer, became just as famous as the old me, Goliath. Lucifer was the head of a hacking crew. Meanwhile Goliath was now the head of a software company.

  There were a couple of official computer magazines that reviewed video games and occasionally mentioned the fact that there was an underground hacking scene. And then there were several underground fanzines, or "scene mags" as we called them, produced by hackers. In those scene mags, hackers wrote about the scene and its celebrities. I was interviewed as Lucifer as well as Goliath a bunch of times.

  I decided that producing my own scene mag would be a great way to promote my hacking crew with articles that were biased in my crew's favor. Of course my scene mag wouldn't have any credibility, if people knew that I was just patting myself on the back. The praise for my hacking crew would sound a lot more legitimate, if it was written by a third party, who was not a member of my crew. So I decided that it would be a good idea to let Goliath, who was retired from the hacking scene and officially had nothing to do with my hacking crew anymore, write the articles about my crew as an independent third person. My scene mag ended up being one of my crew's greatest promotional tools.

  I liked to blaze a new trail, off the beaten path, instead of following in someone else's footsteps. I always tried to dream up new ways of doing things that nobody else had thought of yet. Or come up with some new creative idea that would wow everyone. By now I had recruited so many excellent members into my crew, that every one of them was better at their job than I was. Except creative thinking. That was my specialty. I was the guy with the ideas, and then I asked one of my crew members to turn my idea into reality.

  While thinking about the easiest and cheapest way to produce and distribute a scene mag, I decided to create the magazine as a software file, not on paper. It was the first time ever that a scene mag had been produced in a digital format. Later that idea became so popular that almost every other crew decided to produce a scene mag in digital form as well. There were hundreds of copycats trying to imitate my success.

  But my digital scene mag wasn't just popular because it was the first. I had a natural knack for self-promotion and guerrilla marketing. I tried to come up with the catchiest title I could, so I ended up with the name "Sex and Crime." Come on, admit it, the headline of this chapter made you curious, didn't it? Well, back then, when I called my scene mag Sex and Crime, it had the same effect. It had nothing at all to do with sex, but I knew everyone would be curious to read it.

  And let's be honest, you really don't give a crap about all the hacking stuff I'm talking about right now. The first chapter about prostitution caught your interest, and now you're trudging through this chapter, hoping I'll get back to the juicy stuff soon. Don't worry, there's enough sex in this book to make a crackwhore blush. But I have to explain so
me stuff about my background first, or the rest of the book won't make any sense. So bear with me.

  Anyway, I purposely used a pretty cocky, abrasive writing style in Sex and Crime, to stir up some drama. My confrontational style quickly became the talk of the scene. Some of the things I wrote were so inflammatory, people had to vent about it on online forums. So suddenly everyone in the scene was talking about Sex and Crime, just as I had hoped. I enjoyed playing the role of agitator, and people from competing hacking crews didn't even realize that the more they bitched about the things I wrote, the more credibility and notoriety they were adding to my scene mag. Thanks to all the positive as well as negative feedback I was getting, the things I wrote actually mattered. Suddenly I was the most important opinion maker in the scene.