- This topic has 54 replies, 23 voices, and was last updated 8 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
What can you tell us about Amay, and Skid Row in particular?
My impression of them was that they were Belgian-Danish-American (with SSR being the German branch).
Where did they mostly come from? Who founded them?And why did they suddenly disappear overnight so to speak?
Back then, it appeared to me that Skid Row was to Amiga what IKARI was to C=64. After they disappeared, PaRaDoX took over and held the #1 spot briefly, then they too vanished, followed by Crystal, which also seems to have vanished into thin air, only to be succeeded by PRESTiGE (which seems to have had more than a few former Skid Row members). By that time I had quit the scene so I do not know who succeeded PRESTiGE.
So what can you write about Skid Row?
There is little that hasn’t already been written about SR ; suffice to say, they were dominating the scene in pretty much every aspect at a given time: they had excellent original suppliers ; dedicated crackers (though quality was not always consistent) ; plenty of “ways to communicate” (i.e. bluebox for the Germans and a steady calling card supply from Killerette & Phonestud) and some of the world’s fastest and/or biggest boards (Danse Macabre / Unlawful Entry to name just two in the US). At one point, they have the Europeans release pretty much every single game that was out there, whilst their Canadian (Devious Doze / also sysop of Akira Project) team was releasing all of the high-end (expensive) professional programs such as Scala / Lighwave / etc…
So, there isn’t a straight answer to your question but to say: SR had the ideal combination: right timing / right people / right tools and all of that brought about a pretty unique momentum that allowed them to dominate in the way they did. Just think of it this way:
– If no software is being released / there are no originals to be supplied
– If there are no original suppliers with plenty of time/money on their hands to pick up the software, there are no originals to be cracked
– If there are no dedicated (and skilled) crackers with plenty of time / availability, there are no cracks to be released.
– If there are no ways of communicating (BB / CC) and traders with plenty of time (and phone lines!! – Phonestud traded on 5 lines), there are no releases getting to the boards
– If there is no constant stream of releases, you don’t get the best & biggest boards to be your WHQ
– Without the fastest & biggest boards supporting your group, distribution of your cracks would be slower and less geographically stretched (at least in the early 90’s)SR mastered all of these elements with a combination of coincidence and good planning. That allowed them to be more efficient than the competition and hence they beat them time and again. Sure SR got beaten too ; supplier was too late / cracker not skilled enough / technical problems / inside supplies / etc…
If memory serves me, the group was founded by Metallica in Germany and I think it is fair to say that without the “German backbone” (Including SSR / FFC / Magic Drummer / etc etc), the group would not have become the legend it now is and it most definitely would not have lasted that long. A few of these core-members were pretty seasoned guys that knew “their way around” ; had a good understanding of how to operate and how to beat the competition. Sure SR had members in Denmark but their contribution was mostly $$$ (from sales of software) and calling cards. I believe they may have had a cracker there towards the end but not so sure anymore (20 years ago!).
SR’s presence in Belgium was trivial. As far as I know, they really only had one official member: Wildcard and to this day I am not sure how he got it in or how we was contributing to the group? The infamous Pobox in Amay (near the German border) was operated by a non-scener (rumored to have been a Belgian army-soldier stationed in Germany) who couriered all the mail to Germany in exchange for free software. Other Belgians may have been in SR briefly or did some freelance work (Phil Douglas) but that is pretty much it.
What happened to them? I am guessing a number of elements coincided:
– They got arrogant/complacent and quality of releases went down (hence popular variations of their name Fix Row or Kids Blow)
– It grew beyond proportion and some people were craving for a smaller scale group
– Some people did not feel they were recognized enough for their contributions
– Busts (Akira Project in Canada / Unlawful Entry in the US also taking down an important supply of calling cards through Phonestud & Killerette)
– Competition increased efficiency and beat SR on a more regular basis (either in quality of crack / speed of releasing or “major titles”)
– Loss of interest –> what was left to prove? so some key-members left the scene or became less activeIn the end, it just fell apart and some other (new) groups emerged though they were short-lived. Other members went to the competition and that was it…
Added 33 minutes later:
Prestige is a story in a somewhat different setting BUT you will find that there are quite a few similarities 🙂
By the time Prestige emerged, the scene was a different place. There were less releases and less (competent or internationally organized) competition. To understand this, you need to understand where the originals were released first: this was typically in the three main European countries: UK – France – Germany and each country had it’s fast distributors or shops (Centresoft in UK / FNAC in France and I forgot the name in Germany). In the early days of the scene, you’d have some stuff emerging first in the Nordics or North-America but beyond 1993, that had decreased significantly.
It was unusual for a group to be so organized & geographically spread out that they could “control” all of these sources of influx of originals into the scene. Skid Row (above) and Paradox being true exceptions but generally, most of the “major” groups were specialized in one or -at best- two countries and usually dominated that “source” for a period of time.
So back to my point: Prestige did an excellent job of controlling these sources. They had the best suppliers in the UK and France ; (I am not so sure about Germany as I seem to remember they got beaten by Hoodlum / Prodigy on quite some titles that were released in Germany) and they had the very best and fastest cracker with waaaay too much time on his hands: Mok. (granted – Samir/Groo did some cracks too). Adding to that is the fact they had the fastest board in the US as their HQ (Zion’s Hideout which they had stolen away from my group as WHQ — Grrr, still pissed about that! –). Not coincidentally, Zion’s Hideout was also the main source of calling cards into the entire scene at that moment in time. (the Sprint cards if anyone remembers?) ; Internet/telnet were emerging and steadily being adopted in Europe so in a nutshell, you see the same characteristics:
– Original suppliers [CHECK]
– Fast & good crackers [CHECK]
– Best in class distribution ; i.e. communication-media and BBS’s [CHECK]
– Seasoned “management” [CHECK] (Samir did a great job and learned a lot at Zenith)Again, all of those components combined and that extra little dedication put them ahead of most of the competition, which -in turn- created momentum and this just creates a vacuum-effect for talent/skills. Everybody wanted to join Prestige and they picked the cream of the crop. The rest is -as they say- history.
In my personal opinion, I remember both groups differently. Skid Row truly dominated on an unparallelled scale and for a LONG time. Prestige also dominated ; perhaps in a less competitive environment but they delivered 100% quality. Either way, it was an honor to have been part of the scene in that era!
PS: You forgot the period where Fairlight was pretty much putting out every single release 🙂
Yeah thanks for writing that TCB, especially didn’t know too much about Prestige since by then I was getting out of the Amiga scene.
Your list of things required in a group was interesting, people from ‘outside the scene’ don’t realise just how complex + inter-connected all these things were!
eg: Orig supplier but no crackers? they will join a different group – of course vice versa, crackers with no originals aren’t much good either!
No way to call around for free? no group, you lose… etc, etc… almost every ‘job’ in a group relies on several others being in place, which is why there were so few ‘major’ groups (successful groups who steadily released games for long periods of time).Correct, whereas in the early days of the scene, it only took some time and dedication to put releases out – by the early to mid 90’s that had changed significantly. Competition had pushed the levels of efficiency to a point where “management” and money were required.
A statement often voiced by people that left the scene was “…it is all about business…” or “…all about the money…”. There is no point denying it – money was needed to run a group in those days:
– Money to buy calling cards (if you did not have hackers or a source yourself)
– Money to buy originals (certain distributors required you to buy a certain minimum amount!)
– Money to buy hardware (modems for suppliers / crackers or hardware to copy/warp the originals)
– Money to pay people (some people took part-time jobs or remained unemployed just to supply/crack/organize)Initially, money was needed to keep up with the competition and that was why certain commercial activities started. Obviously some saw the potential and went completely overboard 🙂 In the end, I believe most of them got busted for one reason or the other
Popular ways of collecting money:
– Selling calling cards (for the happy few that a good source)
– Selling copiers (SNES/SEGA/etc…)
– Selling software
– Leech-accounts on top boards
– Paying members (yes some were willing to pay just to be “in” XYZ)
– Distribution BoardsThe latter was an interesting one as all you needed to do was (a) put the bbs name/number in your intro + upload your releases there or (b) upload all you could to that board. Generally, the more “exotic” the location where the BBS was situated, the more you could charge. Everyone will probably remember seeing boards in the middle east (Paradox had one / Quartex had one and … Global OverDose had one!). These must have been the sons of some Sheik running (usually) a single-noded BBS to get access to software they would normally never get in their country. These would pay _substantial_ amounts of money. The one we had paid us $1000 a month just to upload amiga/pc games to him. Remember, this was 1993 and $1000 was a shitload of money… GOD was making close to $1500 a month combining all activities but still that was not enough to propel us into the “major league” ; we simply could not get a proper original supplier and hence the group always stuck with doing loads of trainers / one-files / hd-versions and the occasional half-decent release (some French-version games / CD32 conversions and the odd ugly game that the other groups had overlooked or skipped).
I think all in all, GOD lasted a good 3 years and I have very fond memories of those times. There is not a single MBA-program that can prep you for corporate life as being a group organizer for a little while:
– You need to attract the right talent/skills and retain them
– You need to coordinate all activities and drive for results
– You need to compete in an ultra-competitive environment
– You need operating income to cover expenses
– You need a distribution model and need to overcome logistical challenges
– You need branding/marketing/image/PR
– You need quality assuranceObviously, down the line I also made some mistakes (and got busted for it) but I’d do it all over again (in a heartbeat!) since today I am applying the same skills in a business environment (and loving every little bit of it!)
@TCB!
Interesting presentation which is mostly accurate and insightful, but I’ve seen many exceptions to your rules where alternative ways proved to be better than the classical reasoning. In addition some of the strategies you have described could sometimes backfire against the organizers, and there is proof from historical facts. I have been original supplier for no less than 20 groups (of which 17 elite ones), founder and global organizer of Delight (1991), co-founder of Interpol (1992), co-founder of Paradox n°2 (1993), etc. so I propose to share my views, notably about your friends SR. Please read and let me know what you think.
1. You seem to be pro-Skid Row. Yes they were good, but starting from 1993 and on, Paradox was even better. With Maximilian (and Kimble) it was a matter of millions. Virgin CC’s were flowing by 10,000’s (I saw the thick listings at Max home, he told me to pick some here, pick some there, from any pages I wished…), Nintendo copiers were selling by thousands, etc. Selling software/games? Well, it couldn’t be as powerful as a cash-machine, so why bother? Skid Row was good at that, i.e. they were not playing in the same league. About Max there are quite a lot of articles from official sources which are documenting this. Fairlight was not bad also, with Strider at the top of the organization. So, for me, Skid Row was only third. I don’t know for you, but I’ve also been an official member of Skid Row, before we left with Max to create Interpol. Never joined Fairlight, despite Strider tried to lure me out of Paradox through some of his members I knew quite well. But I was loyal, and close to retreat.
2. Wildcard (hi Fred!): he was one of the best hackers/phreakers around, so yes he could be useful.
3. What happened to them?
– Quality of releases had always been low. Re-read Foxy’s post on another thread. They were kings of the cheap tricks. And arrogant, well, they had always been so, since World of Wonders/Paranoimia. In all regards I won’t argue/say it’s bad/whatever. I’ve seen this everywhere on the crack scene. I’ve been like that, too, and I won’t fire a shot in my foot. But sure it tired some of their members and there has been many spin-offs, say, Ministry, Hoodlum, Crack Inc., to quote only some of them. Creating your own competition is not very clever.
– The second Paradox was the next-generation group and Skid Row could not compete.
– For the rest, I like your analysis, it’s rather exhaustive.
4. Prestige / “To understand this, you need to understand where the originals were released” i.e. “fast distributors or shops” “FNAC in France” … Well, an original supplier who would have only relied on FNAC would have been on a strict par with low-life competition, which means it would have been like playing lottery. One day you’re first the next day you get beaten. Of course I did this in the beginnings i.e. for Paranoimia, Vision Factory, and even for Crystal, and Quartex to a lesser extent (I already had other tricks then). Through hard work and experiment I learnt the difference between being just an original supplier and being a good or a top original supplier, something which I finally achieved in 1993 in supplying 7 of the 10 best games of the year (and countless others).
By that time, I had a special address book set apart, entirely dedicated to original supplying. It contained the names of all the salespersons in more than 20 specialized retail brands in and around Paris, their preferences when it was possible to bribe them, on which day and at what time they received the originals, from which wholesalers/distributors, the itinerary of the trucks, etc.
In addition I had insides in French magazines. I had passwords to a few game developers’ BBS’s. I used social engineering techniques and called software companies to obtain English versions of the games which were released only in French. I also had an inside whistleblower at Innelec, the wholesaler who was supplying the FNACs and other similar outlets. So, it was a real job, not a lame “go to FNAC on a daily basis”, and I was most of the time on the phone, not having to run between shops. I was just out when needed, and it left me with plenty of time to attend university, organize Delight, make music, go out with friends, etc.
Other tricks were that I didn’t have a modem at home. I did have three modems at different friends’ places in and around Paris. Friends who did want the zero-day warez from the BBS’s for free, and who were either trustable or truly unknown from the scene. Also I didn’t have any pirated software at home. And at last, I changed handles many times in the intro credits, sometimes mentioning UK instead of France, etc. Ok it wasn’t good to appear on top of the charts, but it was good enough to be the best – and I didn’t want fame, just success.
That said you were talking about Prestige and if I’m not wrong the French suppliers were Bomberman and Willy. Not FNAC-runners but also top original suppliers with style and close relations whom I want to take the occasion to greet now.
5. “Skid Row truly dominated on an unparallelled scale and for a LONG time.” – Maybe depending on which BBS’s you had access to… When I had a modem at home, and I flowed through 4-5 elite groups including Skid Row (in fact, I’ve been twice a member, in late 1991 between Oracle and Crystal, and in late 1992, with two different handles, and they never noticed) over a short span of time, I kept my unlimited accesses everywhere. I was unlimited VIP on more than 50 zero-day elite boards! Thanks to this on that period Delight’s WHQ and USHQ were also zero-day, even better than most of the source BBS’s as I had everything combined, hehe!
So what did this teach me? That the casual modem trader who is generally present on 4-5 boards has a distorted vision of the reality. When I frequently accessed all the elite WHQ’s and multinodes, and when I compared to the so-called text charts, they were wrong on many aspects. What I want to say is that Skid Row often released games which were already cracked by others. They were simply not the best in reality. They were just cheating, and above all what they wanted was their intros ahead of any games, so that their customers would remain loyal.Can you walk us through the process of supplying originals, from the moment you had it in your hands to the moment of release by a group.
How did you get it to the cracker ?
How long did it take to get it to the cracker?
Was it frustrating when another group released the game before your group?
Did you meet other suppliers and if so was there a hostile rivalry between you all?
Did you have any problems with difficult protections or bad originals?
What did yuu do with the originals once you had sent it off to the cracker?
What is the game you are most proud of supplying?
Who was the best cracker you worked with?
Hi Musashi9, and happy new year!!! It may seem strange to some people that I’m busy writing and responding here during that period when I should be with family and friends, The reason is I’m sick and quarantined. As soon as I’ll get better I’ll be much longer to respond, if I respond at all.
For now, your questions are mostly relevant and they won’t take much time for me to answer. Let’s take them one by one.
<i>Can you walk us through the process of supplying originals, from the moment you had it in your hands to the moment of release by a group.</i>
Having supplied more than 70 games to a lot of groups, well, there were a variety of situations and I can’t say that it was always the same process. This said, the most often the efficient standard process was the following:
>>>1. Knowing that I was about to get the original, called either the organizer or the cracker (according to the group’s internal processes) in order to have a/the cracker ready and prepared to do the job, b/ the group’s organization oriented towards gathering intelligence, planning & operations tasks.
>>>2. Called the organizer when the original was nearby in the shop, before buying it (in case I wasn’t friend enough with the salesperson to have it for free). This step was necessary in case we were late and another group had just released it, in order to avoid any unrequired expenses. Called again when I had the original in my hands, for a get ready. Here please take notice that we had to go to public phoneboxes, there was no mobile technology at an affordable price at that time (only satellite phones with really huge costs).
>>>3. Ran to the closest modem available, either at my place or at a friend’s place (according to the period/year). Then immediately called again, for the go, launching step 4 at the same time and making comments on the fly (about the way it loads, the sound it made while loading, if there was password protection, how many disks, etc.).
>>>4. So, checked first if the original was running well (even if it was possible to test it in the shop, you never know if something may happen during transport, or due to the computer/chipset), and tried to copy it (each disk) with XCopy in order to have a preview of good/bad tracks. If it seems something it’s most likely what you see. Rarely used better tools, hex editors, etc. to have a closer look. This was valuable information to help choose the appropriate warp tool and give information in advance to the cracker/organizer.
>>>5. Warped the game with the appropriate tool and sent it directly to the cracker. I didn’t like when groups required to send the game to a BBS. It could be unsafe (BBS gets down or a user connects, BBS is attacked by competition or worse, the original is stolen), and a likely loss of time (me uploading, then cracker dowloading, then repeat the process in case of bad warping, in hoping that the BBS is still working).
>>>6. While the upload was proceeding, unwarped the game to a new disk to check if it was working. Non-working was not always as bad as it seemed. Data was sometimes wrongly unwarped but was here for the cracker to sort it out. I had the cracker on the phone and through questions he had and my answers, and then what he saw by himself after receiving the file, it was possible to determine if a second warp using a different tool or parameters was necessary. In some cases, with particular protections it was mandatory to call another cracker. Also according to software companies we were sometimes able to anticipate if it was going to be easy or difficult.
>>>7. While the cracker was making progress it was highly preferable to remain available, just in case a problem would arise later.
<i>How did you get it to the cracker? How long did it take to get it to the cracker?</i>
Already responded. In somes cases we had a local cracker so skipping the modem part, I immediately flied to the cracker’s place.
<i>Was it frustrating when another group released the game before your group?</i>
Yes of course. And the level of frustration was proportionate to a/ the time and energy devoted to the entire procedure and b/ the importance of the release (minor or major game).
<i>Did you meet other suppliers and if so was there a hostile rivalry between you all?</i>
Hehe funny question. I can only speak for myself. If you mean meeting other suppliers at the shop, then it depended on several case situations (all happened in real life):
>>>1. I was first and the other original supplier showed up. Well, good luck dude. Sometimes we exchanged greetings on a courteous basis, sometimes a little more provocating words. We never fought nor acted loudly, or at least I was never involved personally in such acts. There was work to get done.
>>>2. I came and saw another original supplier already there. I immediately tried to hide while keeping an eye on him. Good thing if he thought he was the only one or the very first in advance with the original, then he and his group wouldn’t feel the need to hurry – so it could give us a competitive advantage. And on my side a 5-minutes wait wouldn’t change much the course of the things.
>>>3. >90% of the time I didn’t see any other original suppliers at the shop. According to the shop I could ask the salesperson if I was first or if someone else came before me. Also knowing that I would have hidden if I came and see a competitor there, I was prepared to the fact that others could do the same. Thus, I always did fast and left quickly, not losing any time.
In addition:
a/ I knew where most of the other original suppliers were living, how long it took for them to get there, and sometimes even the same for their modem friends.
b/ If “competing” with a fellow supplier from the same group as me, we co-ordinated and decided who was best placed/located to go and get the original. So if internal, it wasn’t competition.
c/ Outside of real-time supplying situations I was generally friend or at least ok with most other original suppliers, and even if not, rivalry was not something worth fuelling. Once again I was not competing for fame, but to be the best according to my own judgment. Beyond me, I know that certain suppliers were hating each others to the point that they might have come to blows if both were present in the same room – but it was not my problem.
<i>Did you have any problems with difficult protections or bad originals?</i>
Not something which couldn’t be solved, from my point of view. I can’t remember having had any bad originals. For difficult protections we had good warp tools. It also happened that Blackhawk at Paradox developed a warp tool especially for the original in question and it worked. Then the problem of difficult protection was not mine anymore, but that of the cracker.
I did have another kind of problem, but with some inside games. I remember a huge blockbuster I had 6 months in advance of its release in shops. The game had no protection. I told the organizer to be very careful and to ask the cracker to inspect and remove anything which could look like a serial code, then to wait for two weeks before release. He said “yes” to me and promised but he didn’t commit and the game was released one or two days later, not even after a quick look and clean-up. My inside provider was caught and I was very, very upset. The group organizer acted very stupidly, he killed months of preparation of my contact on my side for him to trust me, and we didn’t get any insides for a long time after this.
<i>What did you do with the originals once you had sent it off to the cracker?</i>
1. Kept the originals for myself, as souvenirs.
2. In some cases I had to bring them back to the shops where I borrowed them (if I was in good terms with the salesperson).
3. More rarely, I screwed the disk, went back to the shop and managed to obtain (through negotiation) the next original I had to supply, for free.
In any case I didn’t like when the group asked me to send them the original for me to have reimbursement. I did this only once before I said “enough” and required to be paid in advance for multiple supplies, while being allowed to keep the originals – whether I paid them or not.
<i>What is the game you are most proud of supplying?</i>
Both games which made possible for Interpol and Paradox II to be born. Do a little research… should be easy for you to find.
<i>Who was the best cracker you worked with?</i>
1. The best on every kinds of protections including the hardest possible: T.I.C. (Australian)
2. The best overall for a crack group, very smart, always available, very friendly: Blackhawk. Ex-aequo with Phil Douglas, for the same reasons.
3. The best trainer maker and one of my best friends: Blackbird
4. The fastest possible (saw him crack three games in a day!) but sometimes not 100%: The Surge
5. The most underrated and a very talented one, also one of my best friends: Babydock
I also worked with many other crackers, and I knew dozens more, who surely had a lot of qualities, but I just had less experience with them, so my list is obviously quite subjective.Hi n00w!
You seem to know Max Louarn quite well. A lot have been written about Max, and the scene have been always plague with rumours about him. What can you tell us about him? What’s your personal experience and opinion about him?
It would be cool to know his scene history since the beginning, how and when he started in the scene? Was he coming from the C64 scene? What was the first group he joined? Who were their closest friends? What groups he was member of? Did he use any other handles? What about his arrests? Was he a good leader/organizer? Did he code or make any gfx or music? Was he making really that much money? Was the scene that profitable? What was his relationship with Kim Schmitz? Why he moved to Mallorca? Is true he paid crackers/suppliers and that some of them lived with him?
I remember his second arrest being cover in many national newspapers around the world. It definitely was the biggest calling card fraud ever committed at the time. What can you tell about his second arrest? Rumours said the cards were not originally hacked, but just sold by a corrupted at&t/mci employee that was member of Skid Row (don’t remember the name but they were a couple).
What did he do after being released from jail? Is him the man behind MaxConsoles, The Supreme Factory and Divineo? We all have seen the paradox PS3 true blue dongle releases? Is he the man behind the PS3 true blue dongle?
Many thanks for your time.
Hi Old_Amiga_cracker,
First it would be nice to know who you are. You seem to spawn from nowhere. I would be glad that after you receive my responses you take the time to present yourself.
Still I will respond to your questions now, without waiting for your answer, as after 20 years I think it’s time to rehabilitate some facts. I’ve read so much bullshit on the Web for a long time about so many decent groups and people with attitude, through a lot of distorted information, and this is something that quite hurts my beliefs and my values. I have been journalist and market intelligence analyst for more than ten years so you can understand why I love the facts, and in a certain manner, I’m just doing my job in responding to you all.
Lastly, before we start with Max, one thing which is worth mentioning to everybody here: I’m now working in the sphere of the fight against counterfeiting and piracy, so although I’m interested in rehabilitating some facts for historical purpose, I don’t and I won’t support cracks and warez in any ways. Today Piracy and counterfeiting are harming the economy growth and jobs more than drug trafficking (although for the latter it harms even more on the side of public health and safety, and through global crime derived from these activities). I have all the figures. Today big mafia is involved, so it doesn’t compare with oldschool youngsters of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s. Still, I recognize that as one of them, I’ve committed bad deeds with the consequences I’ve measured, so I’ve done a lot since then, and I will continue to support actively the fight against counterfeiting and piracy, in collaborating with governments, law enforcement and of course, with the right holders themselves.
Now after this… let’s call it a “disclaimer’… the historical facts.
Max and I were close friends. When we established the first contacts late 1991 and when we met at the beginning of 1992, we had complementary objectives. I wasn’t member of any groups anymore on the crack scene, just being organizer of Delight which at the time was mostly a representative figure on the demo scene. I was required to cut the links with my existing contacts on the crack scene, which I did (Max was not one of my existing contacts). I was also required to stop phreaking, pirating warez, etc. which I did. On the other hand I was left with a sense of unfinished work and felt the need to reach some of the goals I still had in mind. I just had to find the right way to do this while staying in a legal framework. I was studying law and I somewhat knew what to do, and what not to do.
At the same time Max was a member in the occasional-release, second-ranking group called Agile. I don’t remember if he told me he did something on the C64 before, but I have vague memories that he said he had one. Personally I came from the CPC 464 scene (a very small one, with its main roots in France) so I did not show much interest regarding this. By the way, I felt a huge potential in him to become a strong leader, as he was smart, square and quick reasoning, had a strong charism, and was very action-oriented. Agile was not a group for him, something which he did already know, so we both came to the conclusion that co-operating together would allow us to reach our respective next-level objectives.
Finally I gave him some training & advice when needed, based on my experience with oldschool groups since 1988, I told him that I didn’t want to take any organization responsibilities and he could do this better than me. The only things I was ok to do were original supplying (an original is not warez) and sharing my opinions through consulting and expertise. Lastly, I gave him some contacts on the scene and advice to reach some specific people matching with his ideas and projects.
The co-operation lasted from 1992 to mid-1993, when I had a/ reached my own objectives, b/ the sense that if I continued I would be involved in things I would neither control nor approve, and c/ the imperative need to resume my studies and build my personal life outside of the scene.
During that co-operation we both joined Fusion, then Crack Inc., then Skid Row, then we co-founded Interpol, and at last we re-founded Paradox (with Blackhawk, Babydock, Zool and Nuisance). We also contributed to TRSI & The Dream Team PC.
After I left Paradox at the end of June 1993, I remained friend with Maximilien. We continued to see each others, to go out in parties, etc. but I’ve never been involved in any of his businesses. He continued sometimes to ask me for advices, but he rarely followed them (as I often told him to reduce his activities, to watch out for this and that, etc.).
So now you have the global picture about how all of this started. Now your next specific questions:
>>> Who were their closest friends? <<<
I was. And I was still here when he came back from his 5 years 7 months jail time in the U.S. He was very affected, a bit lost and not the leader I used to know. But he has always been strong-minded, and he gained a lot of muscles as a pasttime in the U.S., which helped him recover. I remember he said that I was the only one who was still here and welcoming, but it was early after his release, and a few others have showed up in the subsequent weeks and months. At the very least, ED-209 and Monty, if I remember well.
Before we were in touch, I know that Twinblitz/Agile and Frantic/Abuse were among his close relations. I also knew both of them. We shared the same opinion about Twinblitz, that he could be unreliable and possibly dangerous. Frantic was a clever and gifted hacker, and I think Max learned some good tricks from him.
Max also knew Olivier / Quartex as they were both based in the same town: Marseille.
When he was active, most of the central Paradox members were his friends: Blackhawk, Babydock, Zool, Nuisance, Bomberman & Willy, ED-209, Monty, Lincoln… He also spoke often of Papillon in The Netherlands, with whom I had been in touch years before, I think it was at Quartex. Kimble was a story mixing business interests, strange friendship, and betrayal. He also had probably other friends whom I did not know or suspect. You should ask him if you want to know.
>>>What groups he was member of?<<<
I already responded to that.
>>>Did he use any other handles?<<<
Possibly, but not to my knowledge: Max, Maximilian, Maximilien (his true name). At the opposite, I used many, many handles, so if you see some credits of unknown people in Paradox intros, it might as well be me, or any other Paradox members. If you have something more precise in mind, please ask.EDIT: Now that I double think of it, and if memory serves me well, there is another handle Max used when at least at Crack Inc. This handle was The Procurer.
>>>What about his arrests?<<<
Articles linked from Paradox wikipedia page are reliable. I don’t see what you want to know exactly.
>>>Was he a good leader/organizer?<<<
Yes, very good. The best I have known so far on the crack scene.
>>>Did he code or make any gfx or music?<<<
No. He hired some people to do that. For instance: Monty (music) and Ninja (code), Melon Dezign…
>>>Was he making really that much money?<<<
Yes, and possibly more than you can imagine with “that much”. Four special purpose entities in tax havens, is that talking to you?
>>>Was the scene that profitable?<<<
He was reaching far beyond the scene. That’s all I can say. I was no more involved in anything when he did that. I’ve never been involved in any business matters. I wasn’t here for the money. Nor for the fame. Indeed, I’ve always and only been interested in thrill, challenges and achievements.
>>>What was his relationship with Kim Schmitz?<<<
Mainly business. And faked friendship as when business is at the centre of everything. Here from what I know, I’d say that Max was probably the good guy, and Kimble the evil guy. One more thing: Kimble had “native” money, inherited from some family elders, while Max is entirely a self-made man with entrepreneurship skills, although I must admit that part of his family was above middle-class standards.
>>>Why he moved to Mallorca?<<<
The French Nintendo copiers’ affair. He was held in three-weeks preventive custody, enough for him to flee in Mallorca. And he had the money to afford the villa.
>>>Is true he paid crackers/suppliers and that some of them lived with him?<<<
Yes and no. Yes he paid crackers, suppliers and others, through various means: possibly money (never witnessed this, but seems logical), more often gifts (I have true stories but I will keep for myself), a lot of vacation trips to Mallorca, etc. The last responds to your second question. I don’t want to be ironical, but what is the use of an original supplier in Mallorca? Zero, so that sounds stupid. On the other hand many people came there, so he always had friends to go out partying with. And Mallorca is just next to Ibiza.
>>>What can you tell about his second arrest?<<<
Days before, he told me that he was going on a trip to the U.S. to arrange a CC deal. Once again I wasn’t involved with this. I didn’t use CCs anymore for a very long time. But he felt there was something wrong, and he did want some advice. Once more I heard the strange things and I told him to be very careful, and that Nintendo copiers could stand a good defence before the courts, but that he would be doomed with the CC business. Once again he didn’t listen to me, probably because of the attraction to the money involved, and everybody know what happened next. For the rest, read the newspapers.
>>>Rumours said the cards were not originally hacked, but just sold by a corrupted at&t/mci employee that was member of Skid Row (don’t remember the name but they were a couple).<<<
Never heard of Skid Row being involved. Kimble was.
For the rest don’t listen to rumours. Get the facts here:
http://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/foia_reading_room/usab4304.pdf
>>>What did he do after being released from jail?<<<
He recovered and took the time to restart enjoying freedom, and his life with family and friends. Anyone would have done the same in a similar fashion. Also before his jail time he was a serial seducer of women. After that, he finally found true love, married and had a child, or possibly several children now. But that’s another story.
>>>Is him the man behind MaxConsoles, The Supreme Factory and Divineo?<<<
Yes. Once again I tried to give him some legal advice. But money was, well… and for him I was becoming the same boring basher. So let him do what he wants to.
>>>We all have seen the paradox PS3 true blue dongle releases? Is he the man behind the PS3 true blue dongle?<<<
All… I haven’t seen this. I’m no more interested in anything related to crack, warez, etc. The last time I’ve seen Max was in the summer 2002, he invited me for vacation and lent me his appartment in Avignon during the Theatre festival. I was just pleased to see him as a friend, and we went out partying in the region.
Since I left Paradox in 06/1993 and even earlier (end of 1991), I haven’t had any warez or pirated software on any of my computers, I haven’t used P2P except for some legal porn, I haven’t used any cards or anything and I haven’t done anything illegal. Plus I’m now on the complete opposite side of the economy, in the camp of those who are fighting piracy.
Cheers and have a happy new year,
Yours,
FrançoisHere is a detailed article about the calling card fraud involving Max, Kim, Killerette, Phonestud and others:
Playing the numbers, a Triad computer nerd turns employee theft into an international crime wave.
It’s past 9 a.m., and Knight Shadow is late for the interview. It’s not his fault. The federal prison camp at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base is on lockdown for a surprise head count. That happens once or twice a week, in addition to check-ins every two hours.
Knight Shadow, a k a Ivy James Lay, is one of the most notorious. He was the center of an international crime ring peddling stolen calling-card numbers. Its reach spanned from Los Angeles to Germany, Spain and beyond. Lay was the supplier, his light fingers tapping into a computer to steal up to 100,000 card numbers from MCI’s switching station near Greensboro, where he worked as a night-shift technician. He distributed them on-line through his middlemen, guys like “Killer” and “Legend.” They found a ready market in European hackers and software pirates, who used them mostly to call bulletin boards to chat or download stolen programs.
MCI called it the largest fraud of its kind, and it went on for more than a year. The volume of calls was so great it forced AT&T to add overseas capacity so callers wouldn’t get “all circuits busy” signals. Fraud complaints doubled at some phone companies, which had to beef up their staffs to handle them. MCI had five investigators on the case full-time for nine months.
The scheme came crashing down in September 1994 when Secret Service agents raided Lay’s Haw River home. By then, early estimates said, more than $50 million in fraudulent long-distance calls had been racked up. One card alone had $99,000.
GTE lost so much money on this and a similar scheme, it did away with international calling on its cards for a while. MCI, AT&T and others installed new security systems to sniff out fraud quicker. One AT&T investigator claimed the inflated flow of international calls may have affected the balance of trade.
Lay is part of modern-crime mythology – elevated to that status partly by the public’s fear of a technology it doesn’t fully understand. He was No. 8 on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Internet’s Most Wanted list, alongside such techno-hooligans as Kevin Mitnick, the fugitive hacker nabbed in Raleigh in 1995.
Lay pleaded guilty to federal credit-card fraud and got 38 months. He’s been doing time since May 1995 at the Goldsboro prison camp (which, though housed on base, has no direct tie to the Air Force). It’s a minimum-security facility, holding only nonviolent criminals. Seventy percent of the 460 are here on drug convictions; the rest, white-collar, mostly fraud.
Encircled by pine trees, the eight one-story barracks sport peach and pink concrete block, with cream columns in front and triangular orange roofs. It looks like a nouveau-Aztec middlebrow retirement center. Inside, though, the barracks are spartan. Rows of 8-by-10-foot cells with 5-foot rose-colored concrete walls form a maze of institutional cubicles. Each cell has a plain metal bunk bed, desk and two lockers. But no bars.
There are no armed guards, either only “counselors” and “custody officers.” Outside, no fences, just bright-red signs on the perimeter that read “Out of Bounds.” Escapes are rare. “We had one walk away last year,” public information officer Rodney Tabron says. Make no mistake, this is prison. The barriers might be imaginary, but the confinement is real.
At 20 past 9, Jim Lay shuffles into the visitors center, dressed in green prison garb and white tennis shoes. His shoulders are rounded, his black hair plopped to one side. He wears tinted, oversized glasses. Though 6-1 and 215 pounds, he’s unassuming. That’s no shock if you’ve seen photos of the nerdy Kevin Mitnick.
The two visiting areas are taken up by horticulture and drug classes for inmates, so Tabron puts us in a concrete-block room just big enough for two people and a small round table. He sits outside the open door.
Soft-spoken yet chatty, Lay, 31, is anxious to tell his story for the first time. (MCI security officials, through a spokesperson, declined to talk about the case, saying they’d rather put the incident behind them and that disclosing details on their investigation might aid hackers.) He’s curious, too, about what’s happened to the eight others charged in the scheme, most of whom were sentenced after he went in. They range from the 25-year-old son of a Beverly Hills developer to a 58-year-old retired steelworker in Blaine, Minn. Lay has met only one in person. Five got jail or community-center time, though not as much as he did. Two got probation. One is facing similar charges in Germany.
“We never looked at it to the point of going to jail. If we had considered that, it wouldn’t have been worth the risk,” Lay says. “That’s how we looked at it: There’s no big-time crime here. I knew I would lose my job – let’s put it that way.”
For all the money he cost phone companies – calculated eventually at $23 million to $38 million – Lay figures he made only $50,000. The irony is that unlike Mitnick, who stole for sport, Lay did it for the money. He used the dough to fix up the house, buy a truck, take his wife and three stepchildren on vacation to Denver, stuff like that. “I wasn’t planning on going where I went with it,” says Lay, whose MCI gig paid $29,300 a year. “I wasn’t looking at saying, ‘I want to be the world’s largest calling-card supplier.’ I was looking at making $2,000 to take care of some things we needed. But when you get one small amount of money, you find other things you need. You’re just never satisfied.”
Stripped of the hype, Jim Lay is no different from the employee who pilfers office supplies or dips into the petty-cash drawer. Like most employee thefts, his was a crime of opportunity, fueled by greed and resentment. His just had bigger consequences.
Lay got his first computer when he was 15, not long after his parents divorced. He was living in Tampa with his mom, a Waffle House district manager, and talked her into buying him a Commodore 64. It came with a modem, which he used to call bulletin boards. But it wasn’t until after he joined the Air Force at 19 that he got heavy into the pirate community.
He served five years at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, working.as a communications technician on an “alert” aircraft. If the United States were attacked, the plane could issue launch commands to nuclear subs at sea. Lay spent much of his spare time chatting on the boards. He went by the handle Knight Shadow, which he borrowed from a computer-game character. “It was really a big friendship-type thing. I’d get in there and talk to guys in Britain. We’d chat for sometimes hours at a time.”
Eventually, he stumbled across the pirate boards, distribution points for illegally copied commercial software. Stolen credit-card and calling-card numbers were posted there, too. “You probably at any one time had over a thousand pirate boards, plus overseas boards,” he says.
These boards earned their reputations by how fast they got new software. Ten minutes after a program hit store shelves, some board would have it cracked and uploaded. “You’d get back from the store, and I’d already have it,” Lay says. “Anything that came out that they could get their hands on, it was on the boards. Games, financial software, word-processing software. There were $10,000 CAD systems put out there.” The faster and bigger the board, the tougher it was to get on. “They’re very picky on who they allow in.” He started out with small boards, but as he met more people, he got on better and better ones.
When Lay left active duty in 1989, he got a job at Eastern Airlines’ overhaul base in Miami. There he met his future wife, Judy, a mechanic and divorced mother of three. The couple found themselves unemployed when the airline folded in January 1991.
That’s when Lay had his first run-in with the law. Out of work for six months, “we were at the end of our rope,” he says. His cousin in Columbia, S.C., told him about a Subway Sandwiches manager in town who carried out his deposit at night. Lay could grab the cash and run. It didn’t work out that way. “I never got within 20 feet of him,” Lay says. “He saw me and started screaming.” Lay took off running, and the police picked him up quickly. He got five years’ probation for attempted robbery.
“What was so bad was, four days later I got a call from MCI. If I had just waited.” The application asked Lay only if he had been convicted of a felony. Since he hadn’t been convicted at that point, he checked “no.”
That September, he began working at the Greensboro switching station, an isolated cinder-block building outside the city limits, southwest of the airport. Calls in and out of North and South Carolina are routed through the switches there so they’ll travel the fastest paths. He worked the 11:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. shift with three other technicians. His job was to maintain the switches. That meant replacing backup tapes, getting rid of static on the lines, debugging programs and other trouble-shooting.
By then, he was active in three or four pirate boards and entrenched in the underground communities that revolved around them. “It was a world to its own – a whole new community, a whole new lifestyle. Most people, you’d never know they were involved in this other world.” Everyone had a role. Some were crackers. They broke new programs. Some supplied calling-card numbers so members could call boards for free. Lay was a courier. He’d copy software off one board and load it onto others.
He did this at work, where he could call for free, and used a maintenance line so it wouldn’t generate a record. Each night when he got in, he’d set up his computer to download, then let it run while he worked. Two hours later, he’d start an upload to another board, keeping a copy of the programs for himself. “I was downloading a good 40, 50 megs of software a week,” he says. Later, he figured out a way to patch into MCI’s PBX system, setting up a line so he could make calls from home for free.
People on the boards who knew he worked for MCI were always asking him for calling-card numbers, but he assumed he couldn’t get them. Then one night in December 1992, he was working on the station’s high-speed switch, where call data is transferred. Among the reams of data rambling across the monitor, he noticed the 10-digit card numbers and their four-digit personal identification numbers. “I said, ‘Shoot, I’ll have to remember this.'”
Later, he jotted down 1,000 and gave them to cyberpal Oliver Bilak, the Beverly Hills developer’s son. Bilak, a University of Southern California student, was going to Germany with his family for Christmas and knew a big buyer there. “Something happened, and he never got up with him,” Lay recalls. Over the next several months, Bilak sold the numbers piecemeal via the boards. He found little demand. “MCI cards at that time, they weren’t as attractive as AT&T,” Lay explains. “AT&T you could oversiege. You talked to one operator one time, and then you could keep making phone calls. With MCI, you had to talk to an operator each time. These guys didn’t like that.”
But by August 1993, AT&T had clamped down on fraud with new security systems that spotted compromised cards quickly. “AT&T cards were dying really fast, so MCI’s were looking more attractive.”
After demand picked up, Lay knew he couldn’t keep writing down numbers by hand. He figured a way to download them to a file, doing it by remote control from his office, and put filters on the switch’s software to weed out unwanted data.
He set up two distributors in the Los Angeles area to find buyers. One was Bilak, who used the handle “Killer;” the other, Josh Freifield, or “Legend,” then an 18-year-old professor’s son and computer-science major at the University of California-Irvine. Both lived with their parents. “I was using them as front men, so that if anything happened, I wanted myself as far away as possible,” Lay explains. They knew each other, but didn’t know Lay was supplying both. “I didn’t want them going back and forth on things.”
Each had his own deal. Bilak kept half of what he sold, then sent Lay the rest in cash by Federal Express. “He took all the risk,” Lay says. “I said, ‘You handle everything. I don’t want to talk with people, I don’t want to get money from the people, I don’t want to deal with them.'” Freifield got only 25%. That’s because he didn’t want to handle payments directly. They went to Lay, who sent Freifield his cut through money orders.
They ran it like a business, giving volume discounts and guaranteeing replacements on bad cards. They used the bulletin boards to distribute the numbers. “We started out selling them for about $2.50,” Lay says. “We were getting as high as probably $4 or $5 at one point. Toward the end it was about a buck seventy-five.”
That fall, Freifield tapped into a big San Francisco buyer who was reselling the numbers overseas. “He started buying like 3,000 cards a month.” But the market dried up in December when the buyer was busted for copying Sega games. Bilak, meanwhile, found a team of distributors, “Killerette” and “Phone Stud,” to help him move cards to overseas resellers. Killerette turned out to be Michelle Goodzuk, a chunky, bespectacled 25-year-old from Kirkland, Wash. Phone Stud is Enoch “Sonny” White, a legally blind 55-year-old shut-in from Philadelphia who’s on a dialysis machine.
By the time the cards reached the end users, after passing through several layers of middlemen, the price was $20 or more. Nearly all the buyers were in Europe, where analog phones are harder to trace than the digital ones here. Most used them to call boards in other countries and in the United States. But some used them for money-making schemes. Lay knows of two who would call their own chat lines in Singapore, where they got a cut of long-distance charges from the phone company. They’d leave the phone off the hook for hours, racking up thousands of dollars a month.
To help collect money from overseas resellers, Lay enlisted a friend, Ron Stanton, then a 20-year-old Wingate College criminal-justice major from Cary. Stanton, who met Lay on the boards, would get the cash through Western Union or Moneygram and bring it to him every couple of weeks or so. Lay gave him $50 or $100 each time. “He was another layer between them and me,” Lay explains. Stanton had a friend rent a private PO box in Greensboro under another name so Lay could pick up some payments himself. Sometimes, the money came stuffed in the pages of a magazine. “One time they opened a VCR tape, put $3,000 in there and closed it back up,” Lay says.
Bilak and Freifield got involved with the cards partly for on-line prestige. But Lay’s interest was strictly business. He made sure no one outside his inner circle knew he was the source. “I was about as low-key as you can get.” Bilak and Freifield floated stories that they were getting the numbers from an AT&T employee in California.
By the end of 1993, Lay was starting to worry about Bilak. “He got totally out of balance. He got a big head over this, just a lot of boasting. He’s the kind of person who was going to get caught.” Besides, Lay suspected he was selling on the side. “I just wanted to get rid of him.” So in January 1994, he squeezed Bilak out by hooking Freifield up with his two key distributors.
Lay’s cautiousness was bordering on paranoia. At work, he’d check the ceiling tiles for hidden cameras. And he bought a shredder. “I shredded everything – receipts for buying stuff, messages I printed out. I got rid of all of them.” There would be scares when he’d hear about someone getting busted with numbers. He’d get rid of all his files, lay low for a couple of weeks, then start up again.
Afraid that inflating his checking account would tip police, he kept cash in his night stand. “I probably had five, six, seven thousand dollars in there at a time. I’d have stacks of money this thick,” he says, holding his fingers several inches apart, “because it wouldn’t come in hundreds – it came in twenties, tens and fives. We’d pay cash for groceries, pay cash for gas, everything. If you wanted to go somewhere, just grab some money and go.” It wasn’t enough to start living large, but “it took care of a lot.” He bought a used Ford Ranger for $14,000 and spent $2,000 to build a fence to keep in his dogs. He had some land cleared out and paid off a new heating system.
In Lay’s mind, he had the money coming to him. When he started with MCI, employees were getting 10% annual raises, he says. And he was counting on a promotion in six months for another 5% bump. “Then they came out and said, ‘We can’t give you these raises.’ They said it was because of their money situation. Well, that year was their record-breaking year in sales – I mean, they made more money than they ever did. So that kind of killed some loyalty because I saw how the company just lied to keep money for themselves. I’m sure it went through my mind at some point that I could make up some of the money I lost.”
He and his partners figured they would get just a wrist-slap if caught. They had heard about others who got nabbed with numbers and got off easy. Besides, they figured, they weren’t doing much harm. These were just unpaid charges the phone companies would write off. “It’s not like you go over and take $10,000 cash from them,” Lay says. “Everybody looked at it like, ‘It’s all on paper. It’s not real.'”
But the losses were real. U.S. long-distance carriers have to pay foreign phone companies to use their networks on international calls. That can run 50% to 70% of the charge. Plus, the carriers had to hire extra people to handle the flood of fraud complaints. MCI wasn’t the only one hit. Many of the numbers Lay stole were from cards issued by Baby Bells. They use long-distance carriers like MCI to relay calls outside their regions. AT&T got hammered, too, because it leased lines from MCI.
After German police picked up Kim Schmitz, a hacker who Lay says bought cards from him, in March 1994, Lay decided to get out of the racket. “I was worried that sooner or later, it was going to happen to me. Your luck only lasts for so long.” But he knew he’d never be out of it as long as he remained at the Greensboro station. “If I stayed there, someone sooner or later would find out I’m the one who was supplying and blackmail me.” So that spring he asked for and got a transfer to MCI’s national network management center in Cary.
Before he left, he downloaded a batch of numbers for one last score. “I knew if I was going to take that job there were things I had to take care of to sell my house. We had to get the place fixed up, I had to have the money for a down payment on the other house. So I was in a thing where I had to keep doing it to get rid of it. I said, ‘I’ll get all this money, take care of it, and then I’ll be out of it totally.'”
He made that sale in May to a Frenchman living in Spain named Max Louarn, a well-known on-line grifter. Louarn wired the $1,000 to Lay’s bank account. “He’s the only person I did that with. He didn’t want to pay the fees to Western Union.” He unloaded a handful of numbers he had left over on Bilak in June.
By then, he had started his new job as a lower-grade engineer in Cary and moved his family to a ranch house in rural Haw River, east of Burlington. He destroyed all the disks he stored numbers on – except for one he lost in the move. He stayed away from the boards, calling just once in a while to chat. “And when I went to work I was doing straight work. I was out of it. I was looking at it as something that was behind me.”
The knock on the door came on a Saturday evening in late September. It was about 6 p.m., and Lay had just lain down for a nap. His wife answered it. She was greeted by a sheriff’s deputy, four Secret Service agents and three phone-company officials. They had a search warrant.
Schmitz, the German arrested in March, had given up Goodzuk, the Kirkland, Wash., distributor. Phone-company and Secret Service investigators had used phone records to track down Lay as the source. “They came in and said, ‘You don’t have to say anything. We got you already,'” Lay recalls.
A week earlier, he had found the disk he lost during the move, the one with the numbers. He hadn’t gotten around to destroying it. The investigators spotted it on his night stand. “When they had that, I knew I was gone. There was no getting out of that,” Lay says. “And so I, uh, I, you know, I – I did what I had to do at that point.”
That was to spill his guts. He made a full statement, naming names and giving details on the entire operation. “I don’t think they knew the extent of what was going on,” he says. “I don’t think they really realized all of what I had done and how I was doing it. I was the only one who could tell them.”
They had Lay call Bilak as they listened in. “I called him on the premise of what did he ever do with that bunch of cards I gave him. And then he started talking all for himself.” Over the next three days, agents executed search warrants on the houses of seven other suspects in the case. They had Lay call Freifield to make sure he was home when they came knocking.
Lay was not arrested immediately, but MCI fired him that Monday. It kept the incident quiet, and Lay was able to keep the news from his family. By Thursday, he had gotten a job with BTI in Raleigh. The company didn’t ask about felonies.
Then on Sept. 28 he was arrested and released on his own recognizance. Six days later, MCI issued a press release headlined “MCI employee charged in $50 million fraud.” It named Lay. “That’s when it hit the papers,” he says. The biggies had it – the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times – and many of the locals. A Raleigh TV station camped out in front of his house. He was on the front page of USA Today. “One of my wife’s relatives in Denver was sitting there and opened it up and said, ‘Holy Cow!'” BTI saw it, too. He was told not to bother starting work.
His truck was confiscated. So was his computer equipment. He had to give up the house because he couldn’t afford the mortgage.
Of the nine indicted, eight pleaded guilty. Though time was knocked off for cooperation, Lay’s sentence was the longest because of his central role and previous conviction. Stanton, the gofer, got a year, split between a Petersburg, Va., prison and a Raleigh halfway house. He was released last June. Freifield got 27 months in a “shock-incarceration program,” a boot camp for young offenders, in Lewisburg, Pa. Bilak is serving six months in a Lompoc, Calif., prison, and Goodzuk got 15 months in Dublin, Calif.
Lay thinks – and is probably right – that authorities made an example of him, eager to show their low tolerance for computer crime. “They’re doing this more and more to other people. There’s a guy in here for hacking into the Internet. He got a couple of years, in fact.” Assuming time off for good behavior, Lay will finish his sentence next February. He could get released to a halfway house as early as August. Since he has no money to pay restitution, he’ll do 100 hours of community service each of the three years he’s on probation.
Lay, who makes 17 cents an hour as the camp chaplain’s clerk, is not allowed access to a computer. No inmate is. “That’s just one of their security policies. Most of my friends were on bulletin boards, so when I came in here, that was gone. And part of my pastime was playing games on the computer.”
So what’s the worst part of prison life? “Well, one of the things is the separation from the family.” He pauses to think, then as something else occurs to him, he chuckles and grins. “Not being able to mess with a computer.”
Bob Myers looks like a Secret Service agent. With his trench coat and no-nonsense scowl, all the burly, balding 48-year-old lacks is an earplug. The man who caught Jim Lay has had plenty of practice. The Sparta native was an agent for 21 years before retiring last September to become a corporate-security investigator with NationsBank in Charlotte, specializing in internal theft.
His Secret Service posts included the Queen City, Birmingham, Ala., and New York. He guarded visiting dignitaries, from Fidel Castro to Pope John Paul and every president from Nixon on. In the early 1980s, he spent three years assigned to Lady Bird Johnson in Austin, Texas. “I tell people it’s somewhere between Guarding Tess and In the Line of Fire,” he says.
As a Treasury Department agency, the Secret Service investigates financial crime such as counterfeiting and credit-card fraud. Cracking the calling-card case was one of the biggest feathers in Myers’ cap. “The Service calculated the fraud loss at $50 million, so that’s a good-size case in anybody’s career.”
He got involved in May 1994, when security officials from AT&T, MCI and four other phone companies met with agents in Washington, D.C. The companies figured the numbers were being stolen from the Greensboro switching station and, through phone records, had a good idea who was involved. But it was up to the Secret Service to nail Lay and his ring. Based nearby in Charlotte, Myers became the lead agent.
Through a device called a dial-number recorder, agents monitored the suspects’ phones, logging numbers they called. The agents would track as, say, Lay called Josh Freifield in California, then Freifield called Michelle Goodzuk in Washington state. “Then you’d start seeing codes coming up on Goodzuk’s phone,” Myers says. She was testing the numbers. “Then this code would just light up. You’d see calls going to all the other people, using this one code.”
By September, they had enough to get search warrants. “We were going to have one consolidated warrant for all the premises, hit them simultaneously to keep someone from going out and destroying information,” Myers says. “But we weren’t quite ready to do it.”
Secret Service agents in Washington nabbed Frenchman Max Louarn in a sting for another calling-card scheme. They didn’t know until they caught him that he had bought cards from Lay. Worried Louarn’s arrest would alert Lay, Myers scrambled back from an assignment in Florida to execute a warrant on Lay’s home. “We moved as quickly as we could in each district, vs. coordinating it all as one.”
Speed was essential since word travels fast in the hacker community. “I’ve had other cases where it’s the same thing,” Myers says. “Within hours of the first arrest, it’s all over the bulletin boards.” When Freifield lost contact with two boards that had been shut down by agents, he quickly erased his files, dismantled his computer system and moved it to a friend’s house.
Some evidence was lost as a result, but the admissions of those involved provided ample ammunition for prosecutors. “Everyone basically was cooperative once the agents showed up with warrants,” Myers says.
He describes the ring members as “your typical geeks. Shake them up in a bag and they’re all going to fall out about the same.” But that’s not the way they portrayed themselves on-line – which made for some shattered myths once the ring was exposed. “They all lived in this fantasy world to an extent. They were constantly blowing smoke to each other. Some were literally terrified of Bilak – ‘He’s so bad.’ And Jim, they thought he was The Bruiser. He’d track them down – and kill them, for that matter. There was, of course, no truth to it. It was all persona.”
One of the toughest aspects of the case was collecting evidence. One board operator had six PCs linked to a Commodore Amiga 3000 computer. “He was running like 10 gigs of hard-drive daisy chain,” Myers says. It took four agents, working eight hours a day, about three weeks to sort through his files. “And that was just hitting the high spots.”
The case had some serious ripple effects, Myers says. “It made the companies realize their vulnerability to losses that could affect their whole operations.” But the fraud may have been the last of its kind. That’s because of the rise of the Internet. Now that users can pay a local provider $19.95 a month for unlimited worldwide access, the demand for stolen calling cards is not what it once was.
What does Myers think finally tripped Lay up? “Just the volume of calls. If he had not tried to flood the market – I think that was it.” The sheer size of the fraud made it impossible for phone companies to ignore. “And with the volume of numbers they were stealing, it made it easier to track.”
The shame, he says, is that Lay was a talented technician. “He was the most intelligent of the group. He had a lot of potential.” Still, Myers has little sympathy for the man he helped put behind bars. “If you act like a criminal, you get treated like a criminal.”
Mmmh, I know this article. I already used it as an example in previous discussions or somewhere else. Yes Max was in but he was not arrested in the same context. The “Knight Shadow” affair with Kim, Killerette, Phone Stud etc. is this one:
USA v. Kim Schmitz et al: Indictment
Indictment in USA v. Kim Schmitz, a.k.a. “Kimble”; Ivy James Lay, a.k.a. “Knight Shadow”; Claude Oliver Bilak, a.k.a. “Killer”; Joshua Neil Freifield, a.k.a. “Legend”; Michelle Lillian Goodzuk, a.k.a. “Killerette”; Enoch John White, a.k.a. “Sonny”, a.k.a. “Phone Stud”; Ted Anthony Lemmy, a.k.a. “Speed Master”; Leroy James Anderson, a.k.a. “Major Theft”; and Frank Ronald Stanton, Jr., a.k.a. “Mystery”, at the U. S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.
_______
No Max here. And cost to phone companies (not profit for pirates) was estimated to “$23 million to $38 million”.
Other quote from your copy of the above article:
“Secret Service agents in Washington nabbed Frenchman Max Louarn in a sting for another calling-card scheme.”
_______
So there was another calling-card scheme, and it’s this one:
Guilty Plea in Multimillion-Dollar Phone Service Theft
AP , Associated Press
AP News Archive Oct. 26, 1994 6:34 PM ET
ALEXANDRIA, VA. ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) _ Federal prosecutors gained a second guilty plea Wednesday in a case involving up to $100 million worth of unpaid long-distance and international telephone calls.
Max Louarn, 22, of Palma de Mallorca, Spain, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court to conspiracy and wire fraud charges in the trans-Atlantic case investigated by authorities in the United States, Britain and Spain.
Louarn admitted to one count of wire fraud and one of conspiracy to trafficking in the calling card dialing codes issued by telephone companies to enable subscribers to make long-distance calls without paying cash.
Louarn and Andy Gaspard, 23, of Woodbridge, Va., were arrested in September. Gaspard pleaded guilty on Oct. 12 to charges of trafficking in the codes.
Court documents said Louarn, Gaspard and a third defendant, Omar Flatekval, 20, of Northumberland, England, illegally obtained and sold between 40,000 and 100,000 code numbers.
Flatekval was arrested in Britain and is under investigation there, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
The trio used computer bulletin boards in Europe and the United States to peddle the telephone credit codes, authorities said. Profits from the enterprise were not disclosed in the court documents.
But investigators for the major telephone companies that issued the codes estimated losses averaging $1,000 per stolen code number, or a potential total of $100 million, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Louarn faces a maximum penalty of five years’ imprisonment on each count and a minimum $250,000 fine when he is sentenced on Jan. 20.
He admitted taking delivery in Spain of about 40,000 calling codes issued by such companies as AT&T, GTE and Bell Atlantic allegedly stolen by Gaspard from a firm in Washington.
The count to which he pleaded guilty also covered participation in a related calling code conspiracy in Greensboro, N.C., involving distribution of up to 100,000 codes stolen in 1992-94 from an MCI switching facility.
The thefts involved illegal use of 11-digit dialing codes rather than actual pilferage of calling cards issued to telephone subscribers, prosecutors said._______
Here there’s also reference to Max involvement in the “Knight Shadow” affair. Also in a Washington Post article (not quoted here) it’s written that one of the indictees said that Max was the biggest worldwide reseller of calling cards.
Fyi, Englishman Omar Flatekval was Intreq, sysop of Living Chaos, Paradox HQ in the UK.
_______
Another article:
“BRITISH CALLING CARD BUST”
British students have taken part in an alleged £65m computer fraud,
involving the electronic theft of cards that allow users to make free
telephone calls around the world.The hackers, one of whom was only 17 years old, were said to be earning
thousands of pounds a month selling cards… Police found one teenager
driving a new £20,000 car and with computer equipment worth £29,000 in his
bedroom.AT&T officials also found a computer noticeboard called “Living Chaos”
that was being used to sell the cards for up to £30 each. It mentioned
Andy Gaspard, an employee of the Cleartel telephone company in
Washington, whose home was raided. “We found 61,500 stolen cards ready
to be sent to Britain,” said Eric Watley, a secret service agent in the city.(The Sunday Times, 12 February 1995)
_______
Hope this helps…
@NOOw: As a matter of fact, I am not “Pro” or “Against” Skid Row. I was just sharing my view/opinion as an outside observer, obviously influenced (biased?) by what boards I was on and what people I was closest to. I was never a member of any of those groups (except for short “stints” with Vision Factory / Agile / Fusion) so I clearly lack the inside information you were privy to.
My activities in the early 90’s were mostly limited to extensive trading on the US boards (you may remember my name from the rankings on Unlawful Entry / Danse Macabre / Lithium (which used be to our WHQ before they went to Paradox) / Pirate’s Haven / Mirage / Ghetto / Point Blank / Death Row / Zions Hideout etc…), hacking/phreaking and organizing GOD (Global OverDose) and so that’s where I have my recollections from.
I knew Killerette as I was supplying Micro$oft stuff to her group: High Voltage ; I also knew Kimble as I was supplying JAP stuff for his group: Romkids. Both of them ‘paid’ me for my services with cc’s. Ultimately, their respective busts and my name popping up too many times in different (wrong) places inevitably led to me getting a “friendly visit” in 1996 also.
To your points:
1. As you could read in some articles (one of them posted here), Major Theft (Lee) was heavily involved in the MCI-calling cards and was probably channeling some of that money into Skid Row. Subzero is a somewhat active member of this forum ; perhaps he cares to comment? I will take your word for it that Paradox was a biiger and better organized business than Skid Row :). I think I have met Strider/FLT once when he lived in Waterloo/Belgium and given what he turned out to be now, you are probably right he was an excellent organizaer/business man 🙂
2. Wildcard – it’s funny you describe him as a gifted H/P/A. I lived maybe 50km’s away from him, I met him once or twice but never knew him to be a hacker/phreaker ; let alone ‘one of the best’ – I guess it is one of those ironies of life where you find out things about your neighbour 20 years later 🙂
3. Glad we agree.
4. I was citing FNAC as an example as it was where everybody started (Ackerlight / BS1 / Angels?) and was pretty common knowledge. It was actually very interesting to get your insight into the French supplier-“scene” as that was pretty much uncharted domain for me. Flashtro is turning out to becoming the most complete source for understanding some of the mechanics behind the 80/90’s scene :). Clearly, you are still proud of the goals you reached in those days and I respect that ; I did not want to make French suppliers look like “FNAC errand boys”. And yes, Bomberman & Willy were the Prestige-suppliers.
5. I mentioned some of the boards above so no need to repeat and yes, given I traded like a maniac on multiple lines, I was granted special privileges on most boards. I did make the mistake not to trade in Europe a lot as it killed the cards much faster but it also meant I had slower access to stuff that was uploaded in Europe first. I sense you also liked to build up BBS’s from zero’s to hero’s as that was what we liked most at GOD. We would pick a BBS with the right setup (number of nodes), right sysop (with enough cash to keep up with the expansion/upgrades) but that was lacking the support to make it a 0day. We would then start pumping day/night and make it a big/fast board at which point usually a major group “stole” it away. This used to piss me off like hell but in retrospect actually a nice compliment as it is sort of a confirmation of the work we had delivered. Boards that come to mind are
– Hornets Nest (quit the scene)
– Lithium (went to Paradox)
– 11th Hour (don’t remember where it went)
– Concept Elite (disappeared one day)
– Point Blank (quit)
– Zions Hideout (went to Prestige)
Those were fun days and I still think of them from time to time with a lot of nostalgia in mind 🙂 – Those are usually the days I end up on this site, delighted to see messages like yours 🙂
Thanks for your insight & sharing Francois – I hope you get well soon and do check in on this website from time to time and share some other stories for nostalgia’s sake.
A bientot,
Danny
Hi Danny,
Thank you for your answer that was a nice one though. Also please accept my apologies for having suggested that you could be a Skid Row fanboy in my first post.
In fact I think that our paths may have already crossed, possibly on one of our BBS’s at Delight either The Chaotic Entity or The Lost Dutchman Mine in 1993. I’ve noticed two days ago that Global Overdose was well placed in the intro greetings in front of our release of Stardust playable preview which we did together with Blackbird from his home, including the scrolltext mixing both our lists of regards… so if it wasn’t me (sorry I can’t get a hold of everything I did 20 years ago), maybe you were in touch with Blackbird.
I’m currently in the process of rehabilitating the Delight brand as a scene group; in fact this is what brought me here. It was nice to see some of the Delight intros converted in Flashtros. And the one for Springtime also features one of my chiptunes (“Bingo.mod”). Ironically Skid Row also used a music of mine (“Atomic Failure.mod”) in one of their intros (not a flashtro but can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I28s-D7EGFI), while Paradox never did. Max was kind of worried that musics would take too much room and that replay routine issues would delay crack releases.
Also, I didn’t want to mean that you were a casual trader present only on a few BBS’s (sorry if i’ve left you with that impression). I didn’t know Killerette myself but have been a user on Unlawful Entry long ago. I met Kimble once at the 680xx Convention 1993 party organized by Complex, Sanity and others in Hamburg. As far as I remember I didn’t tell him I had been a member of PDX and SR and I knew Max and whatever. I had just retired from the crack scene and didn’t want to move the discussion there. He tried to sell me some cards and I said no, not interested.
About Lithium I was not involved in PDX “stealing” your BBS. I’ve “stolen” (I prefer to say I’ve convinced sysops, hehe) quite a few ones but not to your group.
Let’s get back a little on the points:
1. I already knew this article plus in my last post I’ve contributed a few others about the other affair involving Max and Intreq. I didn’t say that Paradox was bigger (How many members? Huh?) but that it was making more money. Also about better organized, well I wasn’t mentioning business (I have no idea, was not concerned with these aspects, did not see the account numbers…) but the group’s organization in itself.
Btw regarding money if you re-read all of these articles, you’ll notice a big difference between both affairs.
The MCI affair with Knight Shadow/Kim/Killerette/Phonestud/Major Theft etc. but also Max on a certain extent (I think one of his best contacts in the ring was Speed Master – trying to recollect my memory) had a rather similar number of cards involved, but all of these supplied over a three-years period (1992-1994), which means smaller quantities each time.
In the Cleartel affair involving Andy Gaspard/Max/Intreq the cards were supplied all at once. Yes that makes a big difference. It means bigger money, as the business was supposed to be recurring, and of course it means a lot of end users far beyond the scene. I have a little idea where a part of this business could have been supposed to occur, but as I’m not sure, I prefer to stay quiet on the topic.
At last someone previously asked whether cards were stolen or hacked. I’ve responded that here in these two affairs they were stolen of course. But if Kim or Max said something else to someone else, well, I also have an idea of what they could have been talking about – as far as I know it’s not in official articles. I’m not supposed to know anything so please don’t ask, I’m not going to respond.
2. Yesterday I’ve stumbled upon a page which says that Phil Douglas had been a member of Delight (along with The Fugitive) in August 1993, it was in a crack for Delirium and it seems to be right before he joined this group. This is something I should have known at this time, not only because I knew Phil Douglas but also because I had been founder & leader of Delight, so this kind of things may happen, yes. I guess that Blackbird or one of our German co-organizers probably recruited him but he didn’t stay long enough in the group so that it would matter to inform me when I came back from vacation.
3. One last thing about Skid Row, this time regarding the perimeters which could be defined within potential statistics methodologies (apart from what I said that SR was post-releasing many games).
Over their three-years high (1990-1992) it’s true that they did a lot of releases. But for limited periods of time within this era, Paradox, Quartex, Nemesis and Fairlight were better.
So for an all times high, it’s unfair to compare Skid Row with only, say, Paradox. Instead, one should consider the continuity of competition between core networks of members and their friends & followers, which means that in front of WoW+Paranoimia+Skid Row, the comparison should be made with The Champs/Bitstoppers+Quartex(1)+M.A.D.+Paradox(1)+Quartex(2)+Nemesis+Interpol+Paradox(2). There you get a different picture. Otherwise, if we should keep a name vs. name basis, due to longevity Fairlight would probably be the best, ahead of Skid Row. Of course I’m just considering Amiga, excluding past C64 and later PC releases.
Now I know that this aspect of the methodology has its limits, notably because Skid Row and Paradox sometimes exchanged members, the more so as I’m a living proof of this (PNA+MAD+QTX+NMS+SR+IPL+PDX among others). On the other hand, if someone asks I considered myself a member of the QTX+PDX network, something that won’t be surprising for anyone here. I guess that it’s the same for Max, Blackhawk, Babydock, and others who were also members of SR at once in their lives.
4. Mmmh I do not want to be ultra-picky, but:> Ackerlight: they were mostly based in the East of France (Strasbourg, Metz, etc.) with only one member in Paris, doing just some part of the original supplying.
> BS1: they were based in Belgium and to my knowledge had no French suppliers. They were notably supplied by The Kent Team in the UK. Also were one of the first groups with modems and BBS’s.
> Angels: you could ask Foxy, if he comes back here. As far as I know he made friend with Annakin, a salesperson in a northwestern shop in Paris (not a FNAC) who was also a member of the French Amiga demo group Concept, and he got some of his originals this way (closest to where he lived).
Before Angels, on the side of TGS / Paranoimia & Vision Factory, yes I did the FNAC (had an inside there) and a few others, and on the side of The Band they had a duo (Infernal Duo) based in Paris with a supplier and a cracker. The supplier was Wonderboy who also did the FNAC and sometimes got insides by a well-known ST troll fucked in intros by some groups (cf. the acronym FTDG!). The cracker was Dark Blitter (not Lord Blitter/BS1!) an ex-Alcatraz then lead programmer at Ocean, who coded Pang! for the Amiga after he stopped cracking.
5. “I had slower access to stuff that was uploaded in Europe first…” – at the beginning of the 90’s (1990, 1991) everything was uploaded first in the U.S. except if you were more interested in demos. Indeed like you, nearly all of my accesses were on U.S. 0-day boards.
“I sense you also liked to build up BBS’s from zero’s to hero’s as that was what we liked most at GOD.” – Mmmh that’s not really what I did, but I highly respect what you’ve done.
I was not a modem trader, except for Delight and occasionally for Quartex boards. I had most of my special privilege accesses from being an original supplier. I just came and said ‘hey I need unlimited access to your board because it will help bring more originals to our group’. That’s not modem trading at all.
Then for Delight I did not pick unknown BBS’s to grow them up, but I did “steal” the WHQs of Alpha Flight (The Fiend Club) and of Miracle (Inner City). I did like the aura of mythic oldschool boards which had already been well advertised in the past i.e. later I also got The Lost Dutchman Mine, in the same category. Chaotic Entity it was a two-nodes and the sysop was just cool. For The Fiend Club it also had second best H/P/A conference WW, plus it was run by Mitnick himself (years before he became really famous, so it was just coincidence). So they were WHQ of past renowned groups, but yes I grew them upper from the point they were before, until I got caught in a phreaking scheme… but that’s another story, less fun, which I don’t want to remind now.
Regards,
FrançoisAs I am originally from Belgium (as you might have guessed in the meanwhile), I had the pleasure of meeting some of the legends of those days ; unfortunately, I was slightly too young and still into the C64 when I met them so we never “amiga-connected” properly. The Red Baron (Yves) and Ermida (Eric?) & Freud (Marc) of BS1 were the closest ones. Then the whole gang in Brussels: Badamon and Joey Beltram, Mr.Solo (Manu) and what was the name of the guy working at AmigaCity? Then you had Ken (forgot his real name :() with the hot Norwegian girlfriend that would make us sandwiches at 3AM in the morning and make sure our glasses remained filled ; he was close to the AmigaCity store also and supplied some stuff to GOD in the early days.
Never met with anyone from The Band until 20 years later over here on the forum I met Gonthar. They you had Anthony/The Silents (biggest copiers seller in Belgium) & Cenobyte/Crystal (cc reseller) + Crazybyte/TSL (later Purple Haze/GOD) all based in Antwerp.
Junior/Paradise (Fusion) in Liege with his huge coca cola collection and The Mighty Fred way down south of Belgium and finally ofcourse Phil Douglas that lived in a little cottage near Erpe-Mere (or was it Ghent?)at that time.
Oh – what I’d give for a reunion of some sort but not before we all get a “Royal pardon” because a lot of historic crime could be solved at that meeting 🙂
I knew Deature (Thomas?) of Delight pretty well ; I believe he is from Denmark and his old team was called “Kingdom”. He is still pretty active and sometimes comes by this forum so you should ping him. Other than that, my memory fails me as to other people / BBS I might have known. I am in Paris a couple of times a year for business ; if you are still based there, we should meet up for drinks sometime 🙂
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
1 Comment
viagra · March 22, 2020 at 19:13
viagra
WALCOME
Comments are closed.