PLA Issue #37: Christmas Issue

Find all your old christmas carols, put them in a box and burn them. They’re
old, outdated and boring. Here are all the new songs that you’ll hear the litle
brats singing in church this year.

“Charlie The Lineman” – by Colleen Card
sung to the tune of “Frosty the Snowman”

Charlie the lineman had a very handsome hat.
When he wore it out, all the kids would shout,
“Someday I will steal that!”

Charlie the lineman liked to drink beer with the boys.
He’d listen to a country tune,
while he’d play with telco toys.

There must have been some magic in that big green joint they found,
‘Cause right away he began to play and ‘ol Charlie danced around.

Charlie the lineman was as sad as he could be,
For he’d lost his job when Bell found out that he’d been smokin’ weed.
Charlie the lineman yelled out, “I’ll be back someday…
I know some tricks and I’ll give them out!” Oh, this lineman’s gone astray.

“On Little AT&T Fone Center” – by Colleen Card
sung to the tune of “O Little Town of Bethlehem”

Oh little AT&T Fone Center, how many toys you sell,
They help us to defraud from you even though you wish us well.
We love you PBXes, your calling cards are grand,
And in your undying love for us, you still hold out your hand.

Oh little AT&T Fone Center, your operators are the best,
They’re nice to me when I make calls, pranking all the rest.
We make their jobs exciting and some days it is hell,
And even though THEY don’t accept, you still wish us well.

“PLA is Coming To Town” by Colleen Card
sung to the tune of “Santa Claus is Coming To Town”

You’d better watch out, you better be nice,
Better kiss ass I’m telling you why,
PLA is coming to town.
We’re making a list, checking it twice,
Gonna find out who’s paying the price,
PLA is coming to town.

We’ll call you when you’re sleeping,
We’ll call you when you’re awake,
We’ll call your mom and dad for you,
So leave town, for goodness sake!

You’d better watch out, you better be nice,
Better kiss ass, I’m telling you why,
PLA is coming to town.

“We Three Phreaks From PLA Are” – by Colleen Card
sung to the tune of “We Three Kings of Orient Are”

We three phreaks from PLA are,
Pranking people from near and from far,
Finding their numbers, finding their names,
Fone company tells us all.

Chorus:
O— Telco friendly, telco free,
Telco come and dance with me,
Dreams I see them, can’t redeem them,
but I’ve got an operator’s key.

We are born to freedom and strife,
Anger crashing all of our lives,
Pick up a fone, leave me alone,
I think I’ll just call your wife.
(repeat chorus)

Kardz and k0dez to offer have I,
Go to Radio Shack, red boxes I buy,
Cactus, cactus, cactus, cactus,
We promise to make you cry.
(repeat chorus)

“Have yourself an Evil Little Holiday” – by Colleen Card
sung to the tune of “Have yourself a Merry Little Christmas”

Have yourself an evil little holiday,
Break into a fone,
Make free calls all over,
Including Rome!
Have yourself an evil little holiday,
Make an operator scream,
From now on it’s funny just to be mean.

Here we are in olden days,
Happy golden days of bore,
Greedy relative who want a calling card,
Pinch my cheek too hard once more.

Available telcos, everyone’s inside now, ripping open gifts,
Oh what a great security r-i-f-t!
Have yourself an evil little holiday now!

O Telephone Pole” – by Colleen Card
sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree”

O telephone pole, o telephone pole,
You rise so high and mightily,
O telephone pole, o telephone pole,
You rise so high and mightily.
Your pegs are strong in summer’s heat,
And frosty in the winter sleet.
O telephone pole, O telephone pole,
You are brown and mighty.

“Anarchy” – by Colleen Card and RedBoxChiliPepper
sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells”

Running through your yards, popping open cans,
Sometimes clipping wires, then we eat some spam.
Stealing people’s mail, toilet papering trees,
Running from the cops and feds that chase us in the breeze.

Oh, anarchy, anarchy, set their yard on fire.
Hit their window with a stick and loosen up their tires.
Fuck the Bells, Fuck the Bells, burn their building down,
Dive into their dumpsters when rent-a-cops aren’t around.

“The Twelve Days of Christmas Revised” – by RedBoxChiliPepper

On the Twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me…
Twelve Virgin Visas,
Eleven black tone dialers,
Ten stolen P.C.s,
Nine lineman’s handsets,
Eight Motorolas,
Seven operators,
Six red box crystals,
Fiiiiiiive E.S.N’s.
Four cans of Jolt
Three fake I.D.s,
Two airline tickets,
And a janitor job at AT&T!

One ad that I’ve been noticing popping up in every mall in the country the last
few years is the Send-A-Song service. It’s an 800 number you can dial and using
your Visa or Mastercard, you can send the song of your choice to any phone
number in the United States. The fax I received from them states, “In minutes,
you can choose the perfect song, add your personally recorded greeting and
specify a date and time for delivery. The Send-A-Song can be ordered for
immediate delivery or up to six months in advance. Delivery is guaranteed.”

Using your V/MC, the price for this service is $9.95 for one song or $24.95 for
three songs. Sort of pricey, but for cardholders like us, money is no object.
This service is perfect to make your fellow phreaks smile or to make security
officials cry when you send them “Happy Birthday” by the New Kids on the Block,
300 times a day.

The only drawback is the lame selection of songs they offer. You can send some-
one a traditional song by various artists and they just started getting really
hip and adding in alot of country songs. (gag) The best you can hope for is an
old top-40 song that isn’t too nausiating. And if you’re just sending a song to
annoy someone, they’ve got great selections. One song that I’ve been asking
them to get for me is, “I’ll be watching you” by the Police. That would be great
for certain occasions…

When you call their 800 number to make your selection, you have to dial the 800
number direct, or at least make them think you dialed direct. (Don’t call from
your house direct, of course.) In the past, I’ve usually used remote access call
forwarding, but your best bet would be to walk a couple blocks to the nearest
pay phone. You can’t just op divert. If their system doesn’t get an ANI, you’ll
be switched over to customer service, who won’t be able to help you at all.
Send-A-Songs phone numbers are as follows:

800-272-SONG (7664) Order center, fully automated, Visa/Mastercard
800-999-7635 Customer Service
800-915-3443 SAS Retrival Center (In case you weren’t there to get your song.)

Here’s a list of songs you have to choose from when calling 800-272-SONG:

So fire up your favorite C-Master program and start sending songs to your loved
ones (and not so loved ones). It’s easy, it’s fun and it’s FREE! “Send-A-Song
plays approximately an 80-second segment of the song you request, usually the
most familiar verse and chorus. You may sample 3 songs for 15 seconds each when
placing your order. The Send-A-Song automated delivery service will call the
number you specified at the time you requested. If an answering machine picks
up or someone else answers and your person isn’t there, we’ll leave a message
which will allow the recipient to call back and receive their S-A-S. If there is
a busy signal or no answer, we’ll keep trying…”

Are you tired of people changing their phone numbers, making them unlisted and
password protecting their phone accounts so that you can’t bug the hell out of
them for weeks on end anymore? Well, that will no longer be a problem for you,
once you’ve obtained the FACS number in your area.

The FACS acronym means Facilities Administration and Control System, but most
Bell employes refer to it as either “Assignment” or “FACS”, pronounced “fax.”
This office can take any address or phone number in the area that it covers
and give you every single number that goes into the entire building/house.
This can be extremely useful for a variety of things, including…

The list could go on forever. Your local FACS number is a valuable thing to
have, no matter what you’re using it for. And it’s really easy to get ahold of
and use. Even easier than the CN/A and they don’t require a password! (None
I’ve encountered, anyway.)

Getting the FACS number is easy, yet tedious and you’ll usually end up being
put on hold for a few years before you finally get it. All it requires is a
single phone call to the billing office. The residential billing office will
work just fine but it’d be best to go with the business billing office
because they answer the phone a lot quicker and are trained to be more
courteous. Residential offices treat you like shit. So, grab your phone book,
turn to the front few pages and look up the number for the Billing Office for
Business Accounts. Call it. (It really doesn’t matter if you divert this call
or you dial direct.) Type a few random selections on their automated menu until
you get a real operator. The conversation would go something like this…

OPR: Southwestern Bell, how may I help you?
YOU: FACS? I need you to check on an address for me.
OPR: I’m sorry? You’ve reached the billing department.
YOU: What? This isn’t Assignment?
OPR: Nooooo, this is the RMC.
YOU: Hmm, in my handbook it has you listed as the FACS. Do you happen to have
the FACS number there in your handbook?

(At this point, some of the more clueless employees will ask you exactly
what FACS is. Just explain that it’s the number you use to find out what
lines are going into a certain address, if they ask.)

OPR: Let me check here for you…Are you with Southwestern Bell?
YOU: Yes, this is Greg Carson. I’m a lineman. Phear me.
OPR: …Okay, the number I have here is 1-800-673-7286.
YOU: Isn’t there a regular number in there that’s not toll free?
OPR: Hmmmm…yes, there is. It’s 210-xxx-xxxx.
YOU: Okay, great! Thanks alot, you putz, you just gave me the information I
need to cause alot of misery here in town! Bye!

And that’s about all you have to do. If you’re unlucky with one operator, try
right back with another operator. Usually the only problem I encounter is an
operator that doesn’t know what FACS is or doesn’t know where to find the
number for it, even if I explain to them it’s in their handbook. A few of the
operators have actually called up the FACS office themselves and run the
addresses for me, then they gave me the number to FACS. U.S.West, you gotta
love ’em.

You’re best off with a number that’s NOT toll-free. Mostly because the FACS
toll-free numbers that I’ve dealt with only let you dial from within that
state, making the number useless after I moved. Besides, dialing the 800
number would mean a permenant record of your number on their bill. Try to get
the billing office to connect you to the FACS the first time, then ask the
FACS office what their direct line is, to make it easier for you to call.

Okay, good job, you got the FACS number. The rest is easy. It seems that every
FACS’s main security proceedure is to ask, “Do you work for us?” If you confirm
that you do work for them, you’ve passed the test and they’ll tell you anything
you want to know. So far, in my experiences, this holds true for Southwestern
Bell, GTE, U.S.West and Ameritech. (GTE being the friendliest and most
helpful.)

The area that one FACS office covers varies with all the different phone
companies. When I dealt with Southwestern Bell, it only covered my city and
nowhere else but with Ameritech, the office covered an entire third of Illinois.
The GTE number I had covered the entire state. (But just the areas serviced by
GTE, of course.) If you reach a FACS office that doesn’t cover the region
you’re looking for, they’ll almost always happily give you the number you need
to access the area you need and will sometimes connect you to it.

When you finally call FACS, you’ll be pretending to work for the same company.
I usually claim to be a lineman because I can think of more excuses to their
questions. Sometimes I try being a billing office operator. Whichever you’re
more comfortable with. The conversation will go somewhat as follows…

(FACS offices are notorious for making you hold forever. Better bring some
coloring books to play with while you wait. I’ve had to wait for over a half
hour before…)

FAC: Can I help you?
YOU: This is Paul from Ameritech, I just need for you to run an address for me.
FAC: Okay, which office are you with, Paul?
YOU: I’m not in an office, I’m working in the field in Bloomington, Indiana.
FAC: What is it, exactly that you need?
YOU: Well, I’m in a telco can here and I’m trying to sort out all the lines
for a building down the street. I just need you to read off all the cable,
pairs and numbers going into this address here.
FAC: Okay, and what’s the address?
YOU: It’s 1313 Mockingbird Lane SE

(Note: You have to know the exact address, including whether it’s a Lane,
Street, Avenue, Etc. and if it’s got a SE (SouthEast), NE, NW, SW in front
of it or after it. If one little measley thing is out of place, it won’t
come up on their computer.)

FAC: (type, type, type!) Okay, I have three lines going into that address with
room to add one more line. I have 656-0284 on cable 10 and pair 758, then
656-2913 on cable 10 and pair 720, and 656-0831 on cable 10 and pair 402.
YOU: Great! Any other lines going into that address?
FAC: Nope, that’s it.
YOU: Okay, then. Thanks alot and have a good day!

It’s probably not a good idea to ever insult the FACS lady and/or harrass her
after you’ve gotten the information you need. This will just piss her off and
make her know she’s been had, thus tightening security for everyone else who
calls after that, including yourself.

If you’re wanting to check on multiple apartments in a single building, you’ll
have to ask them to type in each individual address, such as 1313 Mockingbird
Lane SE Apartment 12, 1313 Mockingbird Lane SE Apartment 13 and so on. Some of
them have actually been nice enough to fax me the list of numbers if it’s a
really large list. (You can have them fax it to a copy shop for you, or a
number diverted to your house.)

If you don’t have their correct address or don’t have an address at all, you
can still ask them to check a number for you. When they ask for the address,
give them an address which you know doesn’t exist. Frustrated, they’ll finally
ask you for the phone number and they’ll run it off of that. Usually, you’ll
also get the address this way, but not always. Sometimes they’ll want you to
read off the work order number. Just tell them that you left that in your
truck and your truck is two blocks away and you’re too lazy to go get it.

Well, in a nutshell, it’s going down. If you’re one of the people who used to
call 512-703-8910, enjoy it while you can. I bought the voicemail expecting to
use it for YEARS, paying for it legitimately with hard earned cash even. (Well,
probably stolen cash, but it’s legitimate on their end, isn’t it?)

First of all, they moved locations which changed my VMB number. (If you don’t
remember, the details on that one are outlined in a previous PLA issue.) Last
week I called them to arrange my six month in advance payment like I always do
and they informed me of a slight change in rates.

Usually it would only cost me a flat rate of $7.50 a month, nothing else. NOW
they want to charge $7.50 a month which will allow the box to be accessed only
thirty times in a month. That means I’m only allowed to have one single call
on it per day, including myself calling in to check messages. That’s okay,
though, because for each additional call over 30 a month, they charge an access
rate of 42 cents. Only 42 cents, that’s not so bad, is it?

Well, I asked them how many times my box had been accessed last month and they
checked and told me only 283 times. I quickly grabbed my pocket calculator out
of the holster on my belt. Dead batteries, so I found a pen in my pocket
protector and did some quick math and figured that I’d be paying $118.86 per
month for my additional calls, plus the $7.50 per month just to own the box.
And the guy on the phone didn’t seem to think that was just a little outrageous.
He promised me that someone would call back, but nobody ever did.

So, I’ve stopped paying and I’ve also made a lot of collect and third-party
billed calls to my VMB number. As of this writing it’s still up and working but
it should be going down really soon. I just hope that some horrible holligan at
random doesn’t call up the voicemail company and offer to pay for my box a year
in advance with their credit card. Now that would really piss me off! (ahem)

I strongly urge anyone who reads this, never to call and harrass the employees at
512-458-6005 or 512-472-3535, especially Ann. She’s a really nice lady and
doesn’t deserve to be phoned at work and rude, horrible things said to her. And
if you’re ever in Austin for a HoHoCon Convention or any other reason and you
just happen to be walking around downtown and pass by 1011 San Jacinto, please
don’t throw any bricks through that beautiful picture windows of theirs. And
whatever you do, don’t ever go inside to the room with a big “300” on the door
and super-glue their locks shut or steal all of their mail. That would really
upset me. Especially if you happened to be carrying a one gallon bucket of
hot pink latex paint and you spilled it all over the hallway there and some of
it splashed on their door. Gee, I hope HoHoCon is in Austin next year…

Awww yeah! R0y in da house! Ok kids, here’s what’s been going on
in the good old 618 latley. (LIke any of you really care)

First off, there was the short lived Booty Call BBS. Zak, Nekid Amy
[the girl from PLAGIF07], Zensless1, Quinbus Flestrin, dhate and myself set
it up one night out of sheer boredom. We wanted to see who all would call and
act like an idiot. We used the names Papa Ray, Fly Honey, M.C. K0sh3r, D.J.
Skratch -n- Sniff, Jermaine and Big Mack as the sysops. About 40 people fell
for it. I deleted the bbs later and forgot to save all the mail and shit, but
none of it was worth reprinting. Basicly we set it up to look like a bbs ran
by gansta rappas, but that failed. Everyone just logged on and played Studs
and shit. No one posted or anything. A few people left us feedback trying to
act like nazis and shit. Those people were Ramsey and Skinhead. What idiots!

Next, there was the saga of #rock. It is still going on today.
Basicly what happened was El_jefe (Zak) went into #rock because that’s where
[Z3ns] (Zensless1) liked to hang out. Some stupid bitch called El_jefe an
asshole. Now while not totally untrue, it was enough to piss him off.
He had [Z3ns] op him, then he bankicked everyone and took over.
After that had become boring, he left. Later he came back and it was empty.
So he told everyone else and we all started hanging out in there, taunting
those who would come in. We still use it every night, and taking it from
the losers as become easy. Doing things like netsplit hacks gets old fast,
so you have to trick them. My favorite trick is to make them run PLA.IRC,
a script written by dhate. Not only does it make them say fruity things like
“I Wanna suck dick in the name of r0y!” and “I love to jerk of to pix of
Nekkid Amy!!”, but it also adds “+ +” to their .rhost, mails me with their
passwd file and floods certian people with an ls of their entire system.

Other days we would do shit like choose countries to envade, but
that would result in us getting kicked pretty quick. But then there was
#heislord. Now you may remember good ole’ Scott the Beleiver and is fat ass
daughter Chatty. Well, when Scott was brave enough to irc, he would go hang
out in #heislord, an all christian channel. Well, back in the day, we would
go in there and annoy the hell out of Chatty and Scott, but they quit ircing
all of a sudden. (Wonder why??) We quit going in there regularly until the
other night. We were all hanging out in #rock being bored when dhate msged
us to come to #heislord. We went and the stupid fools had just oped him.
Now, they generaly NEVER op someone that hasn’t spent tons of time in there
kissing ass. But for some reason they decided to be the Good Samaraton with
dhate. Bad mistake!

We went in there and deoped everyone. Then started busting out with
our usual insults “God molested my kids” and shit like that. Zak has a way
of pissing them off real good. The best part was when a few of them tried
to spoof dhate into giving the channel back. They came to #rock (we had
#heislord invite only, and I was holding #heislord2-8) and told dhate to
come to #ircops. I went as well, and they made it +i. They started telling
dhate shit like “We can nickname collide you and your whole server will be
off irc!” and “We are ircops buddy, you better give #heislord back right NOW”
Now the funny thing was none of them were ircops because they didn’t have
a * next to their nicks. If they were ircops, the idiots never used it.

I could go on about this for days, but the best thing to do is come
into #rock, unless ofcourse you have a life and better things to do on irc,
and you can see for yourself. It’s pretty lame!

Last but not least, I have my personal call to make some people’s
lives very hard. I used to like to hang out in #anime! for a time and talk
about my favorite shows in there. Well, I met two real assholes in there.
One of them goes by the nick rin but sometimes uses g-wu to fool me.
The other changes nicks daily in an attempt to avoid harrassment. Their
info is as follows:

Known Nicks: rin, g-wu, gundam-wu
Real Name: George Wu
email: g-wu@ux5.cso.uiuc.edu or g-wu@cso.uiuc.edu
Goes to U of I Urbana
Things that piss him off: Tell him his dick is broken. Ask him if
he has ever been able of fuck a girl all the way. Tell him Joy
is a fuckin whore. Tell him PLA 0wns him!

Known Nicks: rei, gundambab, wu-chan, cranbearri, yu-chan ect.
Real Name: Joy Toda
email: jotoda@leahi.kcc.hawaii.edu or todaj@uhunix.hawaii.edi
HOME PHONE NUMBER: 808-595-6640 or 6690 (can’t read my writting)
Goes to U of Hawaii
Things that piss her off: Call her by her real name, Joy! Tell her
that she must be really bad in bed if George couldn’t get off.
Call her a fuckin whore. Tell her PLA 0wns her. Just say r0y.

Oh well, that ought to do it for me. Sorry this article wasn’t more
informative, but hey, it’s PLA! r0y 0wns y0u!

Not a whole lot for the news department this month, just an old T.V. transcript
that’s been sitting in my computer for awhile now. Enjoy…

Inmate Danny Faries conducts credit card fraud over the phone
Transcript of the show, 60 Minutes, Sunday September 29, 1991

Mike Wallace (Host): 1-800-CON-MAN is a tale about credit card fraud, a billion
dollar business. And while that may not surprise you, I think what we found in
Miami certainly will. It surprised us. For four long years, before he was
convicted of murder, a crafty conman named Danny Faries ran a nationwide Jail-
house Shopping Network, for he ran it all, without ever leaving his cell in
Miami’s Dade County Jail, where, believe it or not, inmates have telephones
right in their jail cells and can make local calls and 1-800 calls free of
charge.

Danny Faries: I would challenge you, Mr. Wallace, if they put you in a room the
size of your bathroom at home for years at a time with a telephone, that I would
challenge you to–that you would come up with some pretty inventive stuff to do,
because you do everything through the phone.

Wallace: And that’s exactly what Danny Faries did. Using a telephone from a
large cell on the tenth floor of Miami’s Dade County Jail and later from this
six-by-eight foot cell, federal investigators acknowledge he managed to steal as
much as $2 million worth of merchandise. And how did the business work?
Accomplices on the outside provided Faries with hundreds of credit card numbers
taken from charge slips in hotel dumpsters. And then he used those credit card
numbers to order merchandise from mail-order catalog by telephone, arranging for
the items to be delivered overnight, again to accomplices on the outside, who
would sell the goods and split the proceeds with Faries. Faries even persuaded
his fellow inmates to let him use their extension telephone as his own private.
You take the extension phone into your cell…

Faries: Actually, it was a vacant cell that I quite literally had turned into an
office. We were having a ball.

Wallace: And you did business.

Faries: Oh, yes, sir, a bumper business.

Wallace: And it went on for four years, with Faries ordering everything from
collectible gold and silver coins to Rolex watches, to video camcorders. And
with the help of those accomplices on the outside, he hit states from one end of
the country to the other.

Faries: Oh, it’s so easy to find confederates. I split right half with every-
body. I mean I never took more than half. I got robbed a lot but again, you kind
of take it on the chin, you know what I mean? It was, like you said, heck, it
was all free.

Wallace: So he ordered cases of the best champagne and gourmet gift baskets and
thousands of roses, and he had them sent to the families of other inmates and
even to his prison guards.

Faries: They’re working stiffs, you know? They’re not making much money, and
they’re seeing this stuff going on, and they’re hearing about Dom Perignon and
trips to the Caribbean. And there I am in my cell. They know what’s up. There’s
no–you know, I tried to send–at Christmas and on holidays, I tried to send
out, you know, baskets and…

Wallace: And it costs them nothing.

Faries: Oh, no, no. Perish the thought.

Wallace: Of course, jail officials deny that guards accepted gifts. But one
investigator told us off-camera that he believes some guards did receive items
from Danny. And we even found evidence that Danny dabbled in charity. I have
here a Save the Children Federation Inc., Westport, Connecticut, addressed to
Daniel Faries, 1151 Northwest 11th Street, Suite 104. That’s your jail cell.

Faries: I’ll be darn, yeah.

Wallace: Save the Children.

Faries: Well, yeah. Again, when you have nothing but 24 hours a day, and, you
know, late night on Sunday night after everybody has gone to bed for sure, they
always put these little poor pitiful with flies crawling out of their nose
Biafran babies and stuff on–I mean heartbreaking stuff. 1-800 nunmber, Master-
Card and Visa. And it’s just a phone call. My position was when the people got
their credit card bill, they’d look at it and say, “Well, I didn’t order Save
the Children have for $22,” and they look at the poor children–they’ve all
flashed on those poor, starving children–I can’t believe that most of them
aren’t still paying that $22, Mr. Wallace. I would, if somebody did this to me
and said, “Look, give, doggone it!”

Wallace: But what about the cops? Well, they were not amused by the Jailhouse
Shopping Network.

Lieutenant Ross Hughes: I think Danny Fairies is a convicted killer and a
conman, nothing more.

Wallace: Lieutenant Ross Hughes and fellow Officer Raul Ubieta of the Metro-Dade
Police spent months building a case against Faries, and they knew he had
confessed to murdering a friend while under the influence of cocaine.

Hughes: He’s already in jail for murder, possibly facing the electric chair. So
the fellow has no fear of any reprisal for the fraud he was doing.

Wallace: So he engaged in what is called the Jailhouse Shopping Network, a
very successful enterprise.

Hughes: And he was very comfortable in that role.

Wallace: And he would remain comfortably in business because Hughes and Ubieta’s
case against him was eventually dropped by the Dade state’s attorney. Why?
Insufficient creditble evidence, the state’s attorney said. The two Metro-Dade
investigators continued to warn jail officials about Faries’ continued phone
access, but jail officials said it would violate Danny’s rights to take his
phone away.

Hughes: He’s allowed access to a telephone.

Wallace: In order to steal? You know perfectly well that he was stealing. I
mean, this must have been a matter of some frustration to you guys who’ve been
after him now, according to this, for a year or two. And you’re getting no place
with it.

Officer Raul Ubieta: Any time an investigation doesn’t come to a proper
conclusion for the investigator, it’s frustrating. So…

Wallace: Listen, you told the correction personnel, “Go in there and take the
phone out of his cell.” What’d they tell you?

Ubieta: If I recall the memo right, that he couldn’t do that.

Wallace: Jail officials finally did search Faries’ cell, seizing hundreds of
credit card numbers. But that didn’t put him out of business, because he still
had a telephone and one hidden credit card number.

Faries: And I had written this on the bottom of my bunk. And it was a woman’s
card, though. It was Regina Donovan–was the name. And it was a good number.
And I said, “Well, here we go. We’ve got to do something.”

Wallace: So Faries used the credit card number to pay for a newspaper ad and a
telephone answering serivce.

Faires: And I ran an ad in USA today saying “Cosmetic package: $89.95 value for
only $19.95. All major credit cards accepted. Please call Regina Donovan
Cosmetics, a 1-800 number.”

Wallace: But Danny never intended to sell any cosmetics. All he was after was a
fresh batch of credit card numbers.

Faries: Well, the girls there, they an–they take the orders, and they write
down–they–“Thank you for calling Regina Donovan, may I help you?”, “Yes, we
saw your ad.”, “Oh, yes, may we have–what credit card will we be using today?”
They wrote their number, the expiration. And then at the end of the day, I would
call and they’d have all these numbers. It was incredible And so I just got a
whole new stack of numbers and I was off.

Pete Collins: You could call him up any time of the day or night, and he was
working around the clock, particularly when I was interviewing him.

Wallace: Pete Collins is a free-lance writer in Miami who is writing a book
about Danny Fairies and his Jailhouse Shopping Network.

Collins: The operation was working in as many as 40 states. There were as many
as 150 drop sites, dozens of employees, $750,000 documented in stolen goods,
perhaps up to $2 million to $4 million, and that was just during an 11-month
window of his captivity.

Wallace: And you got this mostly from the Secret Service.

Collins: I got all of that from the Secret Service.

Wallace: That’s right, the Secret Service. In addition to protecting the
president and going after counterfeiters, they also work credit card fraud
cases. And they began to investigate the Jailhouse Shopping Network, too. They
searched Danny’s cell twice, and they confiscated over 1000 stolen credit card
numbers and catalogs. But Danny still had access to a telephone, and he still
did business, just as he had for nearly four years.

Faries: Even on my cell door at ICDC in Dade County, I had a Mastercard and a
Visa logo on the outside of my door. It was pretty wide open. So…

Wallace: Everybody knew what you were doing, and you kept on doing it.

Faires: It was incredible. I know it’s–I just say…

Wallace: I don’t get it. Why would they give you access to a phone if they knew
what you were doing?

Faries: I give great phone.

Wallace: I’m quite serious. Why would they keep letting you have access to a
telephone?

Faries: I don’t know. I would–of course, every time that they would say, “If
you don’t stop this, we’re going to take your phone away,” I said, “Okay, then
I won’t do it anymore.”

Wallace: But Danny knew that he had a legal right to phone privileges while
awaiting trial. So he was able to go on stealing hundreds of thousands of
dollars in merchandise. We wanted to find out more for ourselves about telephone
access for the inmates at the Dade County Jail, so we went there to take a look.
There’s a guy on the phone right there. And nothing had changed. We visited
Danny’s old cell. This was the office that Danny Faries worked out of?

Unidentified Man #1: Yes, sir.

Wallace: Not much bigger than somebody’s bathroom. We were amazed to find a list
of telephone numbers on Danny’s old cell wall. So we called one.

(Speaking on telephone) L.L. Bean order department, Can I order some merchandise
this way? And I can order how much? Can I order $100 or $1,000 or $10,000 worth
of stuff? No limit. My name is Mike Wallace, and I wor for 60 Minutes, and I’m
sitting in a cell… L.L. Bean hadn’t heard about the Jailhouse Shopping Network
but they did say that credit card fraud is a problem for them. And L.L. Bean had
received an order from onen Tommie Chappell, the inmate who inherited Danny’s
old cell. Explain something to me. I go into your cell and suddenly I see on the
wall…

Tommie Chappell: All of Danny’s numbers.

Walllace: Are those Danny’s numbers? It turns out that Tommie Chappell was only
one of many inmates who had learned how to use the Jailhouse Shopping Network,
courtesy of Danny Faries.

Faries: They don’t even have to be terribly intelligent and only marginally
capable. It’s not–it doesn’t–it’s like a trainn, Mr. Wallace. I feel like I
constructed a train, and just darn near anybody can drive a train. Heck, it’s on
a track. All you got to do is put the fuel in, credit card numbers, and this
train will go.

Wallace: But Tommie wasn’t about to acknowledge to us that he had graduated from
the Danny Faries college of credit card manipulation. You’ve never done any of
this?

Chappell: No.

Wallace: Raise your hand. Since Tommie Chappell wasn’t going to confess, we
asked Sergeant Ted Tate of the Metro-Dade credit cardr squad what was going on,
what is going on at the Dade County Jail. Sergeant Tate, level with me. It’s
still going on…

Sergeant Ted Tate: Yes, sir, it is.

Wallace: …in Dade County…

Tate: Yes, sir, it is.

Wallace: …in ICDC, over telephones, with credit cards.

Tate: It’s going on in the Dade County Jail System, yes, sir.

Wallace: How come?

Tate: I don’t know the answer to that.

Wallace: Well, surely, Lonnie Lawrence, the director of Dade County Corrections,
the man who requested a Secret Service search of Danny Faries’ cell, he could
explain why the Jailhouse Shoppingn Network was still alive and well.

Lonnie Lawrence: There are legal guidelines that say that we shall provide phone
access to inmates.

Wallace: Inside the cell?

Lawrence: Yes. They don’t care where you provide it, as long as you provide it.

Wallace: But what about inmates who abuse the phone system? For instance, let’s
say he’s threatening the judge who put him away on the phone.

Lawrence: We still have the ability to do that.

Wallace: You can take that phone away?

Lawrence: We’ll take the phone away.

Wallace: So you can actually take phone privileges away. What you have not been
able to do is to take phone privileges away from guys who are in jail and
scamming over the phone.

Lawrence: Well, I think that we’ve been able to restrict their phone privileges.

Wallace: I went into Danny Faries’ old cell this morning three hours ago. Right
there is the telephone. Right there on the wall, there’s a list of 1-800 numbers
and credit card numbers. I called L.L. Bean. They were taking my order. I was
playing Danny Faries, slick as it could be.

Lawrence: Well, you know we don’t have a perfect system.

Wallace: And nobody knows that better than Danny Faries. He was finally
sentenced to five years for credit card fraud on top of an earlier life term for
murder. And he was moved to the Charlotte Correctional Institution, a much
tougher Florida state prison, where with prison guards looking on, we met a
chastened Danny Faries. He told us that prison officials here have made sure he
can no longer practice his trade.

Faries: I would like to be very clear, I don’t want them–perish the thought
that they might think I’m still wielding my telephonic sword, you know what I
mean? I can’t do that.

Wallace: Why not?

Faries: Here in the state prisons, they’re much more sophisticated.

Wallace: So what you’re saying is you’re going straight, perforce now, now at
Charlotte correctional center.

Faries: Yeah–or having to go on a new direction, because the–oh, well, I mean,
come on. I’m not just going to roll over, Mr. Wallace.

Wallace: Isn’t there a lady in Fort Lauderdale you’ve been talking to?

Faries: I don’t know. Who are you…

Wallace: Did you offer to set her up in business and rent an apartment from her
as a drop site?

Faries: Oh, I’m sure that I probably did.

Wallace: Recently?

Faries: Now, see, you would get a fellow in trouble with all these folks
standing around us here.

Wallace: I mean, come on. I mean, you’ve just professed innocence. You don’t do
it anymore. That’s what you just told me, Danny.

Faries: I know. I know. Well, you know, here’s what I’ve got…

Wallace: But somehow you’re in ntouch with a lady in Fort Lauderdale, renting an
apartment which is going to be a drop site where you are ordering or she is
ordering or somebody is ordering camcorders and things like this…

Faries: As he nervously takes a drink of his root beer. (Drinks root beer.)

Wallace: I mean, you’re a crook and a murderer.

Faries: That’s what they say. Doggone, I wish they didn’t say that, though.

Wallace: Danny Faries has been moved to yet another Florida state prison and
he’s been told that he will be isolated from his fellow inmates if he ever
abuses the telephone privilege again. And Dade County Jail officials say they
now have new procedures for inmate phones. After we went down there to report
this story, those inside jail cell telephones were removed.