Private Investigator at Work

All three of those calls were made by the same person: a private investigator we'll call Oscar Grace. Grace had a new client, one of his first. A cop until a few months before, he found that some of this new work came naturally, but some offered a challenge to his resources and inventiveness. This one came down firmly in the challenge category.

 

The hardboiled private eyes of fiction - the Sam Spades and the Philip Marlowes - spend long night time hours sitting in cars waiting to catch a cheating spouse. Real-life PIs do the same. They also do a less written about, but no less important kind of snooping for warring spouses, a method that leans more heavily on social engineering skills than on fighting off the boredom of night time vigils.

 

Grace's new client was a lady who looked as if she had a pretty comfortable budget for clothes and jewelry. She walked into his office one day and took a seat in the leather chair, the only one that didn't have papers piled on it. She settled her large Gucci handbag on his desk with the logo turned to face him and announced she was planning to tell her husband that she wanted a divorce, but admitted to "just a very little problem."

 

It seemed her hubby was one step ahead. He had already pulled the cash out of their savings account and an even larger sum from their brokerage account. She wanted to know where their assets had been squirreled away, and her divorce lawyer wasn't any help at all. Grace surmised the lawyer was one of those uptown, high-rise counselors who wouldn't get his hands dirty on something messy like where did the money go.

 

Could Grace help?

 

 

He assured her it would be a breeze, quoted a fee, expenses billed at cost, and collected a check for the first payment.

 

Then he faced his problem. What do you do if you've never handled a piece of work like this before and don't quite know how to go about tracking down a money trail? You move forward by baby steps. Here, accord- mg to our source, is Grace's story.

 

I knew about CreditChex and how banks used the outfit - my ex-wife used to work at a bank. But I didn't know the lingo and procedures, and trying to ask my ex- would be a waste of time.

 

Step one: Get the terminology straight and figure out how to make the request so it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. At the bank I called, the first young lady, Kim, was suspicious when I asked about how they identify themselves when they phone CreditChex. She hesitated; she didn't know whether to tell me. Was I put off by that? Not a bit. In fact, the hesitation gave me an important clue, a sign that I had to supply a reason she'd find believable. When I worked the con on her about doing research for a book, it relieved her suspicions. You say you're an author or a movie writer, and everybody opens up.

She had other knowledge that would have helped - things like what reformation CreditChex requires to identify the person you're calling about, what information you can ask for, and the big one, what was Kim's bank Merchant ID number. I was ready to ask those questions, but her hesitation sent up the red flag. She bought the book research story, but she already had a few niggling suspicions. If she'd been more willing right way, I would have asked her to reveal more details about their procedures.

LINGO

MARK: The victim of a con.

BURN THE SOURCE: An attacker is said to have burned the source when he allows a victim to recognize that an attack has taken place. Once the victim becomes aware and notifies other employees or management of the attempt, it becomes extremely difficult to exploit the same source in future attacks.

You have to go on gut instinct, listen closely to what the mark is saying and how she's saying it. This lady sounded smart enough for alarm bells to start going off if I asked too many unusual questions. And even though she didn't know who I was or what number I was calling from, still in this

 

 

business you never want anybody putting out the word to be on the look out for someone calling to get information about the business. That’s because you don't want to burn the source - you may want to call same office back another time.

 

I'm always on the watch for little signs that give me a read on how cooperative a person is, on a scale that runs from "You sound like a nice person and I believe everything you're saying" to "Call the cops, alert the National Guard, this guy's up to no good."

 

I read Kim as a little bit on edge, so I just called somebody at a different branch. On my second call with Chris, the survey trick played like a charm. The tactic here is to slip the important questions in among inconsequential ones that are used to create a sense of believability. Before I dropped the question about the Merchant ID number with CreditChex, I ran a little last-minute test by asking her a personal question about how long she'd been with the bank.

 

A personal question is like a land mine - some people step right over it and never notice; for other people, it blows up and sends them scurrying for safety. So if I ask a personal question and she answers the question and the tone of her voice doesn't change, that means she probably isn't skeptical about the nature of the request. I can safely ask the sought after question without arousing her suspicions, and she'll probably give me the answer I'm looking for.

 

One more thing a good PI knows: Never end the conversation after getting the key information. Another two or three questions, a little chat, and then it's okay to say good-bye. Later, if the victim remembers anything about what you asked, it will probably be the last couple of questions. The rest will usually be forgotten.

 

So Chris gave me their Merchant ID number, and the phone number they call to make requests. I would have been happier if I had gotten to ask some questions about how much information you can get from CreditChex. But it was better not to push my luck.

 

It was like having a blank check on CreditChex. I could now call and get information whenever I wanted. I didn't even have to pay for the service. As it turned out, the CreditChex rep was happy to share exactly the information I wanted: two places my client's husband had recently applied to open an account. So where were the assets his soon-to-be ex-wife was looking for? Where else but at the banking institutions the guy at CreditChex listed?

 

 

Analyzing the Con

This entire ruse was based on one of the fundamental tactics of social engineering: gaining access to information that a company employee treats as innocuous, when it isn't.

 

The first bank clerk confirmed the terminology to describe the identifying number used when calling CreditChex: the Merchant ID. The second provided the phone number for calling CreditChex, and the most vital piece of information, the bank's Merchant ID number. All this information appeared to the clerk to be innocuous. After all, the bank clerk thought she was talking to someone from CreditChex -so what could be the harm in disclosing the number?

 

All of this laid the groundwork for the third call. Grace had everything he needed to phone CreditChex, pass himself off as a rep from one of their customer banks, National, and simply ask for the information he was after.

 

With as much skill at stealing information as a good swindler has at stealing your money, Grace had well-honed talents for reading people. He knew the common tactic of burying the key questions among innocent ones. He knew a personal question would test the second clerk's willingness to cooperate, before innocently asking for the Merchant ID number.

 

The first clerk's error in confirming the terminology for the CreditChex ID number would be almost impossible to protect against. The information is so widely known within the banking industry that it appears to be unimportant - the very model of the innocuous. But the second clerk, Chris, should not have been so willing to answer questions without positively verifying that the caller was really who he claimed to be. She should, at the very least, have taken his name and number and called back; that way, if any questions arose later, she may have kept a record of what phone number the person had used. In this case, making a call like that would have made it much more difficult for the attacker to masquerade as a representative from CreditChex.

 

MITNICK MESSAGE

A Merchant ID in this situation is analogous to a password. If bank personnel treated it like an ATM PIN, they might appreciate the sensitive nature of the information. Is there an internal code or number in your organization that people aren't treating with enough care?

 

 

Better still would have been a call to CreditChex using a nun bank already had on record - not a number provided by the caller – to verify that the person really worked there, and that the company was really doing a customer survey. Given the practicalities of the real world and the time pressures that most people work under today, though, this kind of verification phone call is a lot to expect, except when an employee is suspicious that some kind of attack is being made.

 

THE ENGINEER TRAP

It is widely known that head-hunter firms use social engineering to recruit corporate talent. Here's an example of how it can happen.

 

In the late 1990s, a not very ethical employment agency signed a new client, a company looking for electrical engineers with experience in the telephone industry. The honcho on the project was a lady endowed with a throaty voice and sexy manner that she had learned to use to develop initial trust and rapport over the phone.

 

The lady decided to stage a raid on a cellular phone service provider to see if she could locate some engineers who might be tempted to walk across the street to a competitor. She couldn't exactly call the switch board and say, "Let me talk to anybody with five years of engineering experience." Instead, for reasons that will become clear in a moment, she began the talent assault by seeking a piece of information that appeared to have no sensitivity at all, information that company people give out to almost anybody who asks.