by Patrick Appel
Part of a fascinating article on a 14-year-old blind phone telephone prankster:
By 14, Weigman was conning his way through AT&T and Verizon, tricking them into divulging insider information — like supervisor identification numbers and passwords — that gave him full run of the system. If he heard a supervisor's voice once, he could imitate it with eerie precision when calling one of the man's underlings. If he heard someone dialing a number, he could memorize the digits purely by tone. A favorite ploy was to get the name of a telephone technician visiting his house, then impersonate the man on the phone to extract codes and other data from unsuspecting co-workers. Once he called a phone company posing as a girl, saying he needed to verify the identity of a technician who was at "her" door. Convinced, the operator coughed up the technician's company ID number, direct phone line and supervisor — key information that Weigman could later put to nefarious use, like cutting off a rival's phone line.
The Dish 