The following 1973 memo from the Atlanta FBI Field Office to FBI Headquarters is just classic:
Can't you just imagine some poor FBI Special Agent trying to figure out why his FBI office was being charged $276.78 for credit card calls it didn't make... and then connecting the dots to the memo from the Houston field office ... and the flyer from the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)... and realizing they'd been had?
This scam was possible because AT&T used a system for encoding credit card numbers that was easy to spoof. In AT&T's defense, it was early days; on-line transaction processing was still years away and they needed a system that operators could verify without a big fancy on-line database query. The very first issue (May 1971) of YIPL explains it better than I can:
It goes without saying that AT&T no longer encodes credit card numbers that way. :-) And for the record, I'm not condoning credit-card or third-number fraud. But I am amused at the chutzpah of the SDS in getting people to annoy the FBI in this manner back in the day.
You can read the rest of the FBI file here if you're so inclined.
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