Analysis of Call Box Code Theft Points to Use by Many Culprits

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 bright yellow boxes that dot the county’s web of freeways. But in August, there were nearly that many registered to a box that sits 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 billing computer tapes for the OCTA. “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 call boxes, and GTE Cellular, which maintains the phones, McClure and OCTA officials determined that the excess calls--11,733 of them totaling 25,875 minutes for a bill of about $1,600--were made by a hacker who learned the secret code and telephone number of the call box.

Because of the volume of calls in just a month, officials believe there are many culprits, perhaps a ring of people who bought the secret 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 the bill, LA Cellular will pick up the tab, company spokeswoman Gail Pomerantz said. The bill was only $1,600, according to OCTA spokeswoman Elaine Beno, because the county gets a special emergency service rate.

The call boxes contain solar cellular phones specially programmed to dial directly to the California Highway Patrol or a GTE Cellular maintenance line. But 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 the call box itself.