Ring May Be Responsible for Freeway Call Box Scam : Communications: Officials believe a hacker sold information to others. LA Cellular will pay for the excess calls.

As soon as he saw the August bill for Orange County’s freeway call boxes, analyst Dana McClure guessed something was awry.

There are typically about 12,000 calls a month from the 1,150 yellow boxes that dot the county’s freeways. But in August, there were nearly that many registered to a single box on the Orange Freeway a half-mile north of Lambert Road in Brea.

“This one stood out, like ‘Whoa!’ ” said McClure, who analyzes the monthly computer billing tapes for the Orange County Transportation Authority. “It kicked out as an error because the number of minutes was so far over what it is supposed to be.”

With help from experts at LA Cellular, which provides the telephone service for the boxes, and GTE Cellular, which maintains the phones, McClure and OCTA officials determined that the calls--11,733 of them totaling 25,875 minutes for a charge of about $1,600--were made because the hacker learned the code and telephone number for the call boxes.

Because of the number of calls in just one month’s time, officials believe there are many culprits, perhaps a ring of people who bought the numbers from the person who cracked the system.

“You’d have to talk day and night for 17 or 18 days to do that; it’d be fantastic to be able to make that many calls,” said Lee Johnson of GTE Cellular.

As with all cases in which customers prove they did not make the calls on their bills, LA Cellular will pick up the tab, company spokeswoman Gail Pomerantz said. Despite the amount of time involved, the bill was only $1,600, according to OCTA spokeswoman Elaine Beno, because the county gets a special emergency service rate for the call box lines.

The OCTA will not spend time and money investigating who made the calls; however, it has adjusted the system to prevent further fraud. Jim Goode of LA Cellular said such abuses are rare among cellular subscribers, and that such have never before been tracked to freeway call boxes.

The call boxes contain solar cellular phones programmed to dial directly to the California Highway Patrol or a to a GTE Cellular maintenance line. The calls on the August bill included 800 numbers and 411 information calls and hundreds of calls to financial firms in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. That calls were placed to these outside lines indicates that the intruders made the connections from another cellular phone rather than from the call box itself.

Each cellular phone is assigned a seven-digit Mobile Identification Number that functions like a phone number, and a 10- or 11-digit Electronic Service Number unique to that particular phone (similar to the vehicle identification number assigned every automobile). By reprogramming another cellular phone with the MIN and ESN of the call box phone, a hacker could charge all sorts of calls to the OCTA.

“That’s not legally allowable, and it’s not an easy thing to do,” McClure said, explaining that the numbers are kept secret and that reprogramming a cellular phone could wreck it. “Most people don’t know how to do that, but there are some.”

Everyone involved with the call box system is confident that the problem has been solved, but officials are mum as to how they blocked potential cellular banditry.

“I don’t think we can tell you what we did to fix it because we don’t want it to happen again,” Beno said with a laugh.