Piracy - did you ever get caught?

[Mark_C]

Originally Posted by Steve T

https://archive.org/details/bad_influence_se2ep11

You can always rely on kids TV to spread misinformation, a couple of hysterical segments on game piracy, Andy pretends to be a creepy game pirate and then dumps a load of floppies in the bin and Violet, after showing the audience the delights of xcopy, even takes a screwdriver to one disk to destroy its evil. Later, Andy compares a real copy of super starwars to a fake streetfighter 2 - as if they were the same game. Remember kids; "if you use a fake cart, it might blow up your system!"

LOL Steve, I remember watching that when it first aired. Nostalgia!

When Violet takes a screwdriver to the disk, it looks like she's laughing. Such a waste of a floppy, just format and reuse it!

[Phreaker]

Never indulged that much. However I was invited to a certain police deptartment computer crime squad. signs up everywhere "PIRACY IS A CRIME" what were they doing? playing the network version of quake which hadn't been released in Australia at the time. True Story. Too top it off i knew a lady who dropped off those box of snacks where you take your snack and put your money in the box (profits go too charities etc) she had one of these boxes at the same office . No Snacks and No Money and Nobody saw anything ....

[XDelusion]

Hmm, I have an old school piracy story to share. Didn't get caught either.

I lived in Dallas and later Forth Worth Texas back in the mid through late 80's. I had got a SMS for Christmas, and a local store at the mall carried game for it behind the counter.
As fate would have it, the games were stored right next to one of the gates for the employees to get behind the counter, and the counter was VERY long featuring 3 gates total, and one employee. So to make a long story short, my friend and I would take turns. One would go down to the other end of the counter and begin asking the employee questions about this or that. In the mean time, it was the job of the person holding the short straw on that day, to sneak behind the counter, and grab a few games.
We didn't have the balls to get everything the store carried, but we did manage to grab a few gems, Kensiden being one I still remember fondly.

Anyhow, I don't really place piracy in the same leage as stealing from a small retail chain, mom and pop shop, or someone personally really, so this is the best I could do, and probably the most fun I had at actually "piracy" in my life.

[Mr B]

I see someone bought in to the "piracy is stealing" spirit...
*sigh*

We all did stupid things when we were young. I guess we have to forgive you.

[Eclipse]

It's weird for me.
When me and my mates had an Amiga very few games were bought originals. When I got back into the scene I felt I needed all originals.
It wasn't so much guilt, more like I have the money now and I missed out something by not having a genuine box.
My mate used to have a few games his parents would buy and it would be like "WOOOOW! An actual real, pure and original boxed Amiga game".
An original was like gold dust to my eyes

[willbloke]

Back in the day , a local Amiga only shop "may" have hired out games and "may" have sold copied X-copy dongles and software !

[alewis]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

I was at the Digital Symposium in Rotherham, and no Police turned up to that one.

Perhaps if they did, they might have prevented Cosy bringing Final Fight with him that had literally just been cracked, and well, it was all around the hall within 20 minutes!

Got to,indulge in thread necrophillia here.

Was that in late 1993, a certain bespectacled twat from Combat18? If so, plod /did/ turn up, a female copper, along with a beardy type from FAST. He wasn't let in, she was.

Great party though. Met Dave (dangermouse) from The Tower, Andy (jester), and many others. Took Dominic Clifton (hydra) up with me, long journey but worth it. Trying to think of the C18 guy name.

As for being busted... No, but did get a large phone bill post the C4 documentary on boxing, as did many others. Methanoid was busted... Hmm, memories of a thread from here sometime around 2005/6...

What did annoy me was a Sgt based in Chattenden who was selling disks at £1 each, making several hundred quid a week. Not sure what happened to him as I was posted out in 94, after he had a severe problem with Lamer Exterminator

[BanisterDK]

Was cc'ing 24/7 for 2 years from 1990-1992 and never got caught.

Had a good polish friend from NY who was studying at the University. Every morning he came to school he went in to the computer room and startet scan for credit cards. Mostly at&t and sprint cards.

So everyday when he was finished at school he fetched the list and some 1500 numbers to me every 3rd day.

Mostly was dead but a few times I actually got lucky to get some goldcards which lastet for month.

Those were good days.

[Vot]

Someone was talking about the piracy is crime posters... Remember the dvd intro

[ Show youtube player ]

Well the hilarious thing is... The music on the clip itself is pirated. Bwhahahahah

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articl...29/3678851.htm

[kingpin007]

Originally Posted by BanisterDK

Was cc'ing 24/7 for 2 years from 1990-1992 and never got caught.

Had a good polish friend from NY who was studying at the University. Every morning he came to school he went in to the computer room and startet scan for credit cards. Mostly at&t and sprint cards.

So everyday when he was finished at school he fetched the list and some 1500 numbers to me every 3rd day.

Mostly was dead but a few times I actually got lucky to get some goldcards which lastet for month.

Those were good days.

Alot of people got busted by MCI and At&t and if you did not get busted then you are very very lucky ... I heard that if you called the 800 number to dial into at&t that they started call logs of originating number so if a call was made a few times in a day that would also bring up flags .. and especially if the same phone number was being called over and over on various other cards then the destination number would be flagged .. then the computer would record some of the audio from the call in progress .. that's how they knew right away it was a modem connection ..

eventually that's why alot of cards started to die quicker.... at&t had people monitoring the system 24/7


they use the same type of thing with credit cards these days .. they have people monitoring at all times to detect fraud


at first at&t cards were awesome ... but phreaking was easier and safer imo .. well if you were careful .. lol

[OddbOd]

Nah, never got caught, but I was always a low-level anyway and too young to ever face any serious consequences. Sure I used all sorts of techniques, beiging and singing the blues mostly but recharging spent calling cards with bogus cc numbers worked too well to be ignored, only for calls though as it always seemed to be the dickheads who carded goods that got nailed.

Originally Posted by kingpin007

Alot of people got busted by MCI and At&t and if you did not get busted then you are very very lucky

That's not understating the situation, Nortel applied to patent the infamous blue box detector back in 1975, if you follow the references at the bottom it leads forward to several other patents for more sophisticated detection that was more accurate and could nab red & black boxers as well, a later patent even shows the format of the black & blue files http://patentimages.storage.googleap...S4182934-7.png.

Originally Posted by kingpin007

... I heard that if you called the 800 number to dial into at&t that they started call logs of originating number so if a call was made a few times in a day that would also bring up flags

The calls were already logged for billing purposes anyway, analysing the existing records for fraud patterns would've been relatively trivial.

Originally Posted by kingpin007

eventually that's why alot of cards started to die quicker.... at&t had people monitoring the system 24/7

they use the same type of thing with credit cards these days .. they have people monitoring at all times to detect fraud

Not people per se but software backed by human researchers. But your essential point is spot on, the fraud detection systems used today are based on techniques previously used to detect calling card fraud. The de facto standard is the use of neural feedback networks to highlight unusual usage patterns however this is changing as NN-based systems have a very serious limitation, namely that no one knows why they work, they just do.

It cannot be a coincidence that one of the large suppliers of phone switching equipment was Symbolics a company started by Russell Noftsker who was previously an administrator at the MIT AI Lab when the foundations were being laid for NN technology back in the 1960's. Even stranger, the AI Lab is also the most likely birthplace of blue boxing and war dialing.

[MajicMushroom]

Originally Posted by alewis

Got to,indulge in thread necrophillia here.

Was that in late 1993, a certain bespectacled twat from Combat18? If so, plod /did/ turn up, a female copper, along with a beardy type from FAST. He wasn't let in, she was.

Correct!

[XPD]

Nope, never told off or "caught" altho my BBS was well known for the "other" file sections

Think it was one reason for some of us to do it tho, was the thrill of potentially being caught

Hi to all,
Thought i would post some notes on ever getting caught.

I believe i was never caught but i did see the police once, but primarily not because of my doing, as i was visiting another friend and he liked to do some stuff with games.

Anyways, cc, cracking, programming and having fun was all quite the days back in early 90s.

I was fortunate to own all my games as originals, until i made the DMZ edition so images could be sent more easily between countries. I must admit the carrier method from one country to another using people on trains, was the most fun. Today those last few original floppies are gone.
Btw, not illegal in any way

There was some times where i could have ended up in USofA together with Max and having a fun time, but as we all know he did not quite have the time of his life when he landed the last time. That was a sad time during his imprisonment and some long years.

Anyways, I didnt ever get caught but i had a fun time with Danish guys,Max,Kim/ble and the French/German guys from the 90s. We all took chances back then, and slept less and got a huge amount of Coke,Cigarettes and what else could keep us up.

Anyways, ill probably come by this forum later, until next time.
Legends never die, they just sleep
BH/PDX

[hansel75]

Was considering starting a similar thread to this one called-

Stag - did you ever get caught?

Jokes.

Originally Posted by mikele

sure it hasn't, only industry associations want us believe in the theory of "virtual loss". When a kid downloads Photoshop CS5 worth of $655 it's quite naive to presume Adobe's loss of forementioned amount of money that could have been paid but stayed in wallet instead, as this person probably couldn't afford one at the time. It's called "lucrum cessans" - a loss of expected profits, contrary to loss actually suffered ("damnum emergens").

It is quite amusing to read how piracy was doing in UK for example - as black market (Fools n Horses) thing, or as friendly teen swap (kind of computer age replacement for stickers).

In East Europe, there were several factors that kind of forced people into piracy back in 80s and 90s:
- First being poverty, most of countries were either still in communism, or just recovering, and cost of expanded c64 or Amiga would already drain family budget. Just look at how long Spectrum was present and developed in East Europe :-) There were even some government imposed limits on importing "foreign technology".
- Second often having no legal mean to obtain software - most of the compaines weren`t legally present in terms of shops and sales and Internet wasn`t available at the time, so software was coming mainly via such channels only
- It was great way to learn and exchange software with friends, even some made black market bussiness out of it.

Off course, it was destructive for development of local software scenes, even there are many talented programmers in East Europe, as people would get so much accustomed to piracy. Only companies would try to get legal software, and its in some ways influential even nowadays (having higher piracy rates in poorer countries).

What was extremely different, at least in ex Yugoslavia, was that it was really "open" since in international isolation (UN embargo) no-one would protect the IP rights. You would open computer magazine and see pages and pages of advertisments with lists of games and apps for Commodore, Amiga and Atari. I imagined by size of such adverts that would go up to two pages they were some real companies, and then when going to adress, would find a garage with couple connected Amigas and Commodores with few casetophones and floppies working all day long :-)

Later on, you would fin a "local dealer" in your area. Even piracy was cheap to real prices, we were so poor, I would get new Dpaint AGA and my friend would get e.g. UFO or Syndicate, and we would swap (copy) at home :-)

Having e.g. 60 floppies was considered to be "treasure". I remember buying 80MB 2,5 hdd for Amiga 1200, installing all I had to it and still having free space. Amazing sight to behold!

Surely, today I am glad I can buy some Amiga, SPS/3 titles legally to buy my bad deeds back and support the development. On PC side, I keep original Windows and free and open source software and Linux. I try pirated games and buy em if I like them.

Sorry for bumping up an old thread, but it was interesting and I wanted to add my story. I was big into piracy as a teen in NY; ran Devil's Island BBS, the WHQ for M.A.D. But got busted for phreaking in '91 I think it was. The police came to the house with a guy from Telecom/MCI and an arrest warrant. I had hundreds of pirated disks all over the place; the BBS was up and running. They saw everything, even commented about people calling from all over the world (they had monitored me for a couple of days first), but ultimately didn't care about any of it. They only wanted to know how I was able to figure out the phone system.

Shortly after I got nabbed a friend got busted in a big sweep. Operation Sundown I think it was. Again, I'm pretty sure it was mainly phreaking. They seemed to be very focused on phone service theft in those days. I don't think they really understood much about the boards and what was going on with the software; at least the people we had the misfortune (or overdue justice however you want to look at it) of running in to.

Ahh, the good old days.

[TjLaZer]

What was the deal with the phone system that MCI wanted to know about?

[_ThEcRoW]

Originally Posted by OddbOd

Nah, never got caught, but I was always a low-level anyway and too young to ever face any serious consequences. Sure I used all sorts of techniques, beiging and singing the blues mostly but recharging spent calling cards with bogus cc numbers worked too well to be ignored, only for calls though as it always seemed to be the dickheads who carded goods that got nailed.

That's not understating the situation, Nortel applied to patent the infamous blue box detector back in 1975, if you follow the references at the bottom it leads forward to several other patents for more sophisticated detection that was more accurate and could nab red & black boxers as well, a later patent even shows the format of the black & blue files http://patentimages.storage.googleap...S4182934-7.png.

The calls were already logged for billing purposes anyway, analysing the existing records for fraud patterns would've been relatively trivial.

Not people per se but software backed by human researchers. But your essential point is spot on, the fraud detection systems used today are based on techniques previously used to detect calling card fraud. The de facto standard is the use of neural feedback networks to highlight unusual usage patterns however this is changing as NN-based systems have a very serious limitation, namely that no one knows why they work, they just do.

It cannot be a coincidence that one of the large suppliers of phone switching equipment was Symbolics a company started by Russell Noftsker who was previously an administrator at the MIT AI Lab when the foundations were being laid for NN technology back in the 1960's. Even stranger, the AI Lab is also the most likely birthplace of blue boxing and war dialing.

What???. The basis and fundaments of neural networks are well known and in fact i get studied in computer science grades. Are you saying that these are entities with free will?

Originally Posted by TjLaZer

What was the deal with the phone system that MCI wanted to know about?

I was hacking codes on one of their 800#'s to make calls. The guy just wanted to know how I was doing it. I remember they used a 6 digit code, and there were so many codes active on there I could find them dialing by hand. They did kill them within 24-48 hours, every time. For that reason I used them only when everything else was dead... but that was becoming more and more often, so I'd always wind up going back.

The cool thing was the police left everything; computers, modem, disks... except me of course. My friend lost all his equipment when they raided him. Unfortunately I had to sell all of mine to pay for the lawyer. I'm building it back now though... better late than never.


BTW - the system was Telecom's. MCI had or was just about to buy out the company when I got nailed. I forget now which one he was officially with at the time. I think it was still Telecom.