Where has it been confirmed the shooter provided a phone number?

Sniper/s gave instructions in a letter tacked to tree behind VA Ponderosa shooting, for them to be at a pay phone, to receive a call from him/her/them,

they (LEO) dawdled w/ envelope and missed his call, Moose asked him/her/them to call back,

he/she/they called and FBI/ATF/someone answered to hear a recording, (bad one apparently).

Moose asked sniper/s to call back, 'cus recording was bad, and inadvertently tipped the sniper/s that they had recorded his/hers/their recording, at the same time....

They FBI/ATF/Moose squad TRACED that (bad recording) call to an Exxon station pay phone where the un-suspecting Mexicans, drivin a White van stopped to use the phone.....ooopps, bad move for those poor fellows...

Cops/swat/FBI/ATF tipped their hand that they HAD traced the call which contained the bad recording. (which let's the sniper/s know what their up against, bad move on LEOs part, IMHO)

If you fellars are gonna post, why not take the time to get your facts straight, read what has already been posted and quit confusing everyone.

Mike

Prepaid phone cards are much more difficult to trace. If the caller uses the card to call yet another prepaid exchange from a payphone to the destination phone, it is virtually untraceable in the timeframe it would take to identify the subject's physical location.

All phone calls are traceable to some degree.  Prepaid phone cards that route thru an exchange are harder, pre-paid cell phones that are bought without registering a user are hard because you cannot just go to the company office and get a user name.

Cell can be tracked to the cell(tower location) and to some degree within the cell.  All regular phone calls can be ran down to the local exchange in a minute or two.

The hard part is getting someone who can do something to any of the millions of locations where the guy called from in time to catch him.  If he is monitoring police comms, he may know you are coming.

A gold box could do the trick. You can set the switch to appear that the call is originating from any other number. Dial into the gold box from any phone and the software does the rest. Of course that stuff is highly illegal and someone would be breaking felony FCC regs if they did it... oh wait... he's murdering people in cold blood... nevermind... [;D]

Ben Dover seems to have firm grasp of phreaking, been talking to Captain Crunch lately ?


Virtually all cell phones can be almost instantly tracked down to a one block radius.Thats a fact.

This would only work twice at the most before company staff and law enforcement were placed on-site to get that info as fast as possible to relay to a response team.  So, they'd have to cycle through several different companies' cards to keep from being tracked down that way.  ANI information would be passed if the switch is setup to record it, and that's pretty much the default these days to track fraud.  However, it is possible to get around this type of stuff by using simple tricks like what we phreakers call diverters.



I've met talented phreaks that couldn't pass high school freshman English, but have the capacity to memorize switch manuals like reading a comic book.  The information to defeat still functioning telco systems is decades old in some cases and still works, though that's very rare now.  Still, the information is available to anyone with the time and inclination to find it, and technical skill isn't required like it used to be.

Kevin Mitnick is a prime example.  While lauded as the most notorious cracker/phreaker of all time, the truth is that he had very little technical knowledge and exploited the human side of the people he went after.  The majority of his intrusions were done by social engineering passwords out of people, and the few technical attacks he did mount were successful only because the tools were written and provided by others who were more technically inclined than he was.  Mitnick was your basic script kiddie with a PR department and good connections to '0-day.'  That's the only way to describe how he got caught so many times.  And ultimately, his careless use of the cloned cellphone he was using was his undoing.  Taking simple steps it would have been possible to foil being tracked by Shimomura, but he lacked even the skill to do that.

Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...

If you ever have the "pleasure" of meeting up with John Draper, a.k.a. Captain Crunch, keep your distance.  He has severe dental hygene issues.  Also, keep him away from any young boys.

Remember the Alamo, and God Bless Texas...