Hacker Rings Up Big Bill at Call Box : Fraud: Mysterious caller charged 11,733 calls to emergency telephone, OCTA says.

An enterprising hacker reached out and touched someone 11,733 times in August--from a freeway emergency call box in Orange County.

A computer that monitors the county’s emergency call boxes attributed 25,875 minutes of calls to the mysterious caller who telephoned people in countries around the globe, according to a staff report prepared for the Orange County Transportation Authority.

“This is well over the average of roughly 10 calls per call box,” the report notes.

About 1,150 bright yellow call boxes have been placed along Orange County’s freeways to connect stranded motorists to the California Highway Patrol. But the caller charged all his calls to a single box on the shoulder of the Orange Freeway.

The hacker apparently matched the individual electronic serial number for the call box to its telephone number. It took an investigation by OCTA and three cellular communications firms to unravel the mystery, the OCTA report states.

Officials with OCTA’s emergency call box program were not available to comment on the cost of the phone calls or to say how they would be paid for.

But the OCTA report assured that “action has been taken to correct this problem.”

“It should be noted that this is the first incident of this type in the five-year history of the program,” the report states.