Sex and Crime: Oliver's Strange Journey (3 page)

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 some 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.

The more popular Sex and Crime became, the
more powerful of a promotional tool for my hacking crew it became.
At the height of its popularity, about half a million sceners
around the world were reading my scene mag every month. Germany's
largest magazine publishing house ended up distributing Sex and
Crime as a bonus on the floppy disk that accompanied their monthly
computer magazine. So my mag ended up being sold on every
newsstand, and I was actually getting paid to write about the scene
and promote the shit out of my hacking crew. Sweet!

But of course I also wrote about other
things besides my crew. At that time a bunch of right-wing skinhead
extremists had discovered that the online hacking scene was a great
medium to spread their verbal diarrhea. I wrote an article in Sex
and Crime against those skinheads and their racist message. A
computer show on German TV noticed my article and invited me to be
a guest on their show and have a debate about racism with a
skinhead. I was excited that they asked me to be on TV, but I was
too shy to actually go. And I figured, even if I win the televised
debate with the skinhead, his bonehead buddies would just beat me
up in the parking lot after the show.

Anyway, I lived a double life as Goliath and
Lucifer for several years. I did whatever I could to not get in
trouble with the law again, without actually stopping what I was
doing in the hacking scene. So I fully committed to the story of
there being two different people. I had two different PO boxes, one
for Goliath and one for Lucifer. I even had two different hand
writing styles. Whenever I mailed out a floppy disk with cracked
games as Lucifer, the hand writing looked completely different than
the hand writing I used when I mailed out a disk with the latest
issue of Sex and Crime as Goliath.

Under the name Lucifer I was not only the
leader of my hacking crew, but also the first mega-swapper.
Conventional swappers had about 15 or 20 contacts in other crews
with whom they exchanged floppy disks to spread their crew's warez.
I took it to the extreme. Every time my crew released a new game, I
mailed out floppy disks to about 200 different people. If I
remember correctly, proper postage for an oversized envelope
containing a floppy disk cost about $1.70 back then.

Most other swappers re-used their stamps
over and over again to save money. They shellacked their stamps
with a coat of clear glue. Once the glue dried, you couldn't see it
anymore, but when the post office cancelled the stamp, their ink
didn't stick to it. So the receiving swapper could take the stamp
off the envelope, wipe the ink off, and then use the same stamp on
the return envelope. The same stamps were being re-used over and
over again.

To me that seemed way too risky, because
they were clearly defrauding the postal service. So I came up with
a different trick: Instead of putting the proper $1.70 postage on
each envelope, I only put a one cent stamp on it. The German postal
service delivered my packages to my contacts around the world
anyway, but calculated the missing postage and charged the
recipient $1.69 plus a steep penalty. Even though people were happy
to get disks from me with the latest games, they were pissed that
they had to pay a few bucks every time they got one of my
packages.

Then I figured out that if I sent out a
massive amount of packages all at once, the clerk in the local post
office who is supposed to calculate the missing postage for each
package would be overwhelmed and simply forward the packages
through the system without doing all that tedious math. It worked!
That's why I mailed out 200 packages at a time, instead of the
usual 15 or 20.

After a while, the post office realized that
what I was doing was intentional, and that I was defrauding the
post office by overwhelming them with hundreds of packages with
improper postage on purpose every few days. Suddenly the postal
police was on my trail.

Luckily my uncle just so happened to be
working for the main post office in Aachen, and he was in charge of
the PO box department. So when the postal police investigated who
owned Lucifer's PO box, which was the return address on all those
packages with insufficient postage, the warrant landed on my
uncle's desk. Back then PO boxes in Germany were free and
anonymous, similar to Swiss bank accounts. All you had to do was
ask a clerk for a box number, and he handed you a little pink card
with a PLK number on it. Then people could send mail to that PLK
number, and you could go pick up your mail at the post office by
showing the clerk the little pink card.