The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (29 page)

Roberson felt threatened by Weigman and by Rosoff, who kept pestering her for phone sex. Once, after a confrontation with Weigman, she picked up her phone only to hear the high-pitched squeal of a fax machine in place of the dial tone. It had been rigged to last all night. Despite Weigman’s denials, Roberson claims he also hacked into her voicemail. To protect herself from attacks, she became close to another member of Rosoff’s gang, eventually moving in with him and taking part in one of the Wrecking Crew’s pranks.

Roberson was surprised when she learned that Weigman was just a teenager. “I would have never thought that he was a 16-year-old,” Roberson says. “He was smart, and he was feared.” When Weigman called up a party line, he would brashly announce his presence in the chat room with a little smack talk: “How you doing, you motherfuckers?” He might be an overweight blind kid, but on the party lines, he could be whoever he wanted. “That’s why he did what he did,” says Roberson. “He was insecure, but he could be powerful here.”

A
S
W
EIGMAN’S REPUTATION AS A PHREAKER
surpassed even Rosoff’s, his hobby became an obsession. In a single month, he would place as many as 40,000 calls—ranging from a few seconds in length to several hours. He dropped out of 10th grade, spending all day on the phone. His mother was proud that he had found something he was good at and glad he had finally made some friends, if only on the phone. “She left it alone because it was my social outlet,” Weigman says. Matt was also using his newfound skills to bill purchases to bogus credit cards, snagging everything from free phone service to Dunkin’ Donuts gift cards. (“I love Dunkin’ Donuts!” he says.)

Weigman became a master of what phreakers call “social engineering”—learning phone-industry jargon and using it to manipulate telecommunications workers. One day, Weigman picked up the phone and dialed AT&T. Two rings, then a voice: “Thanks for calling, this is Byron. How can I help you?”

“How you doing, Byron?” Weigman asked, adopting the tone of an older man, one at ease with his own authority.

“Good,” Byron said. “And you?”

“I’m doing all right. My name is William Jones. I’m calling you with AT&T asset protection. I’m actually working on a customer-fraud issue. We need to write out a D order.” In a few short sentences, Weigman had appropriated the name, voice and lingo of a real AT&T agent, ordering a rival’s phone to be disconnected.

“What’s the telephone number?” Byron asked. Weigman rattled off the name and number on his rival’s account. Then, to authorize access, he gave Byron the AT&T security-ID code belonging to Jones.

For a moment, the phone filled with the sound of rattling computer keys being struck by expert fingers.

“Looks like it’s paid in full,” Byron said, puzzled.

“Yeah,” Weigman said, “we’re looking at a fraud account, sir. We’re just going to have to take that out of there.”

As Byron filed a disconnection order, Weigman made idle chitchat in his “Jones” persona, speculating on the twisted minds of phone phreaks. “Deep down, I know that they know someday they’re going to get caught up, you know?” he told Byron. “They just really don’t think about it. It’s crazy.”

The words applied to Weigman himself. By now, he had “stoolies” on the party lines eager to do his bidding. As his power on the phones grew, he began to change. Unable to take the teasing and the pity he got for being blind, he grew sneering and mean, lowering his voice, adopting a manly bluster. Using the phone to lash out at others, he directed all the rage he felt at the world against his fellow phreaks. To prove his prowess, he targeted Daniels, a 37-year-old from Alabama who had been arrested for phone hacking as a teenager. “He was calling my landlord and telling him I was a child molester and that I killed people,” Daniels claims.

Still, there was something sympathetic about the kid. “To me, he was still a boy,” Daniels says. Having been to jail himself, he didn’t want Weigman to make the same mistakes he had. So he got Weigman’s attention the only way he could: by beating him at his own game. When Weigman refused to stop the phone attacks, Daniels tracked down the teenager’s detailed personal information, including his Social Security number. That earned him Weigman’s respect, and the two became friends. They would talk for hours on the phone at night, Weigman’s put-on baritone suddenly replaced by a more childish tone. “He was not the big shot he made himself out to be,” Daniels realized.

Weigman opened up about his miserable and impoverished life, crying as he told Daniels how much he longed to see the world with his own eyes. His weight fluctuated from boyishly pudgy to extremely obese, and he was spending more and more time locked in his room upstairs, listening to Nirvana and Muddy Waters. One time, a teacher took his class to a blues club in Boston, and the music seemed to capture what he was feeling: the poverty, the despair, the sense of being trapped. “He lived in a jail at home,” says Daniels. “He lived in a box.”

Daniels urged him to drop the macho bullshit on the party lines and stop drawing attention to himself. Weigman agreed to keep his mouth shut and even christened his new self-image with a more stoic nickname. From now, on he would no longer be Lil’ Hacker. He called himself “Silence.”

O
N A
J
UNE NIGHT IN
2006, James Proulx was watching television at 1 a.m. when a SWAT team suddenly surrounded his home in Alvarado, Texas. A stocky, gray-haired trucker who had recently undergone open-heart surgery, Proulx went to the door, where he was confronted by two armed policemen—their guns pointed directly at him. The officers threw Proulx to the ground, snapped handcuffs on him and put him in the back of a squad car.

They had reason to be suspicious. A call to 911 had come in from Proulx’s house; a man identifying himself as Proulx said he was tripping on drugs and holding hostages. He demanded $50,000 so he could flee to Mexico. He also claimed to have killed his wife. If any cops got in his way, he warned, he’d kill them, too.

As the police soon discovered, however, Proulx was just another swatting victim. It turned out that Proulx’s 28-year-old daughter, Stephanie, spent time on Jackie Donut. When she clashed with Weigman and others, they decided to strike back. “If a female wouldn’t give Matt phone sex,” she recalls, “he would call them a fucking bitch and send a SWAT team to their house.” Weigman considered Proulx a “crazy chick who would threaten hackers,” and he was very direct with her. “You’re annoying,” he told her. “I might come after you.” Four months after Stephanie’s father was swatted, police showed up at her home in Fort Worth, Texas, drawn by a fake call to 911.

One afternoon, not long after Proulx was swatted, Weigman came home to find his mother talking to what sounded like a middle-aged male. The man introduced himself as Special Agent Allyn Lynd of the FBI’s cyber squad in Dallas, which investigates hacking and other computer crimes. A West Point grad, Lynd had spent 10 years combating phreaks and hackers. Now, with Proulx’s cooperation, he was aiming to take down Stuart Rosoff and the Wrecking Crew—and he wanted Weigman’s help.

Lynd explained that Rosoff, Roberson and other party-liners were being investigated in a swatting conspiracy. Because Weigman was a minor, however, he would not be charged—as long as he cooperated with the authorities. Realizing that this was a chance to turn his life around, Weigman confessed his role in the phone assaults.

Weigman’s auditory skills had always been central to his exploits, the means by which he manipulated the phone system. Now he gave Lynd a first-hand display of his powers. At one point during the visit, Lynd’s cellphone rang. “I can’t talk to you right now,” the agent told the caller. “I’m out doing something.” When he hung up, Weigman turned to him from across the room. “Oh,” the kid asked, “is that Billy Smith from Verizon?”

Lynd was stunned. William Smith was a fraud investigator with Verizon who had been working with him on the swatting case. Weigman not only knew all about the man and his role in the investigation, but he had identified Smith simply by hearing his Southern-accented voice on the cellphone—a sound which would have been inaudible to anyone else in the room. Weigman then shocked Lynd again, rattling off the names of a host of investigators working for other phone companies. Matt, it turned out, had spent weeks identifying phone-company employees, gaining their trust and obtaining confidential information about the FBI investigation against him. Even the phone account in his house, he revealed to Lynd, had been opened under the name of a telephone-company investigator. Lynd had rarely seen anything like it—even from cyber gangs who tried to hack into systems at the White House and the FBI. “Weigman flabbergasted me,” he later testified.

But Weigman’s decision to straighten out didn’t last long. “Within days of agreeing to cooperate, he was back on the party line, committing his crimes again,” Lynd said. Weigman didn’t like being cut off from the only community he had. “I was a hardheaded little kid, and I wanted to do what I wanted to do,” he recalls. “I didn’t think this could be serious.” He was also obsessed. “He’s not a criminal—he’s an addict,” says his friend Daniels. “He’s addicted to Silence, to Lil’ Hacker, to being the person who is big and bad and bold. He’s addicted to being the person who can get every girl to do what he asks over the phone.”

Daniels, who owns a party line called the Legend System After Dark, tried to channel Weigman’s energy in a more positive direction by giving him a position as a moderator, making him responsible for managing the phone chats and reining in jerks like Rosoff. As Weigman ran the calls, he began softening up. He even had a girlfriend in her 30s, Chastity, whom he had met on a party line. He seemed calmer since he met her, more the kid he really was. When they had relationship troubles, he confided in Daniels rather than swatting her.

Before long, though, Weigman returned to his old ways. Daniels began hearing from party-liners who said they were being harassed by the kid. “Knowledge is power,” Daniels told Weigman, “but you’re using it for the wrong reasons. They’re going to put you in jail, and you being blind isn’t going to save you.” But Weigman wouldn’t listen. “He saw himself as this underage blind kid in a poor family,” Daniels recalls. “So how were they going to put him in prison with big guys who might want to whup his ass?” Unable to reform his friend, Daniels had to let Weigman go.

When the FBI finally busted the Wrecking Crew, Weigman’s reputation grew. Recordings and details of his fake 911 calls, including the swatting in Colorado, leaked and spread online. The attention only made Weigman grow more paranoid and vengeful. He stepped up his campaign of intimidation, warning his victims that any cooperation with investigators would warrant new attacks. He told one woman he’d make her life a “living hell” and put her husband out of business. He threatened a woman in Virginia with a swatting attack—and ended up calling in a bomb threat to a nursing home where her mother worked in retaliation for her talking to the FBI. He phoned a mother in Florida and said that if she gave his name to investigators, he’d kill her baby by flushing it down the toilet.

In 2007, Rosoff and other party-liners pleaded guilty to swatting. “I’m kind of like a nobody in real life,” he told the judge. “I was actually somebody on the phone, somebody important.”
In a plea agreement that limited his prison sentence to five years, Rosoff ratted out his rival, saying that Weigman had participated in “targeting, executing and obtaining information to facilitate swatting calls.”

But Weigman was still a minor, and the FBI didn’t want to go after him. In a sense, he was being offered a break. As long as he cleaned up his act, he wouldn’t be prosecuted. All he had to do was walk away before April 20th, 2008—the day he would turn 18. After that, any crime he committed would get him tried as an adult.

L
ATE ONE NIGHT THAT
A
PRIL
, the telephone rang at the New Hampshire home of William Smith, the Verizon fraud investigator who was working with the FBI. When Smith picked up, however, there was no one on the other end of the line. In the nights that followed, it happened again and again. At first, Smith didn’t make much of it. Then one night, his wife looked at the caller ID and noticed something strange: It was Smith’s work number, even though he was there at home. “Something’s not right,” she told him.

Smith changed his home number, but it made no difference. The phone would ring again at all hours—this time with Smith’s own cellphone as the point of origin. Weigman, he soon learned, was using his skills and his network of stoolies to ferret out Smith’s private phone numbers and harass him. And he knew Weigman’s history well enough to know exactly where the calls were leading: a swatting attack. “He was fully aware that he might be subject to violence by proxy if Weigman chose to make a false emergency call,” Lynd testified.

In the midst of the harassment, Smith called a travel agent and booked a flight for his wife to visit their son in Georgia. Then he called his son to inform him of the travel plans. Minutes later, the phone rang. This time, the caller ID showed his son’s phone.
But when Smith picked up, it wasn’t his son after all. It was Weigman. Matt was using his phone-company connections to track every call that Smith made and received—and the veteran fraud investigator for Verizon could do nothing to stop him.

Then, one Sunday in May of last year—on a weekend after his wife had flown to Georgia—Smith was working in his yard when a car pulled up. Out stepped three young men, including one with strange, broken eyes. “I’m Matt,” the boy told Smith.

Weigman had driven up from Boston with his brother and a fellow party-liner. Standing in the yard, he could make out Smith’s dark, shadowy figure against a blotch of white light, and he heard the investigator’s familiar Southern accent—the one he had so easily identified on agent Lynd’s cellphone. Weigman told Smith he wasn’t there to threaten or hurt him—he just wanted to persuade him to call off the investigation. After years of intimidating others, Weigman was now the one who felt intimidated. He wanted it all to stop.