vitality to a particular species of bloodsucker.

What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, I
ask, consulting my notes. Is it--credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM
bank machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer intrusions? Software
viruses? Access-code theft? Records tampering? Software piracy?
Pornographic bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable
service? It's a long list. By the time I reach the end of it I feel
rather depressed.

"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward over the table, her whole
body gone stiff with energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is
telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities. Boiler-room con
operations. You could pay off the national debt with what these guys
steal.... They target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and
demographics, they rip off the old and the weak." The words come
tumbling out of her.

It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. Grifters,
conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for
decades. This is where the word "phony" came from!

It's just that it's so much EASIER now, horribly facilitated by
advances in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone
system. The same professional fraudsters do it over and over,
Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense onion-shells of fake
companies ... fake holding corporations nine or ten layers deep,
registered all over the map. They get a phone installed under a false
name in an empty safe-house. And then they call-forward everything out
of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that may even be in another
STATE. And they don't even pay the charges on their phones; after a
month or so, they just split; set up somewhere else in another
Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran phone-crooks. They buy
or steal commercial credit card reports, slap them on the PC, have a
program pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to charities. A
whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con.

"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people," Thackeray muses, with a
special loathing. "There's just no end to them."

We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, Arizona. It's a tough
town, Phoenix. A state capital seeing some hard times. Even to a
Texan like myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque. There
was, and remains, endless trouble over the Martin Luther King holiday,
the sort o