Cell Phone Hacking and Stalking

And now, your hosts, Mike Jerrick and Juliette Huddy.

I'm sure you've been following this. It sounds like a horror movie. Innocent families terrorized in their own homes by a group of anonymous hackers.

Yeah, this is an incredible story. Imagine somebody hearing everything that you say, seeing everything that you do, and using that information to threaten your children's lives.

For 3 families in Washington State, this is no movie. It is a campaign of terror. From the technological terror they say is so real.

Joining us to share their story, sisters Darcy Price and Heather Kuykendall. Uh, it is good to have both of you here.

Also with us, CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com, Robert Siciliano. And Robert, good to see you again. I know you were on just a couple of days ago. Uh, we need some information out of you, but first the story. Give us some, um, Courtney, and you also have two other children, right? What are their ages?

10, Katie's 10, and then Connor's 9.

And Courtney is 16.

She's 16.

Just, how did it start?

Well, it seemed to start with her cell phone, and it spread almost as a virus. It sent out text messages to about 25 contacts in her phone.

The very same message just kind of spread out over 25 different people?

Exactly. It spread out to about 25 people. And then from there, it just went crazy. She noticed her phone doing weird things, so she powered it down, and they powered it back on by itself. Hard to believe. I hardly believed it myself until the next day. My cell phone and my husband's was charging on our kitchen counter, and they were— we started getting phone calls too, restricted phone calls.

Like somebody else was in total control of this phone? Yes, total control of the phone.

And so we powered it off, and then our phones, I watched them power back on. If I hadn't seen it for my own eyes, I—

Maybe we should listen to one of the sound bites so you guys get a feel for exactly what these folks are hearing when they answer their cell phone.

Get the fuck out.

We will kill people at Curtis when you least expect.

All your stupid fucking friends.

And Curtis is the school, right? Is that where Heather goes?

That's where Courtney goes.

I mean Courtney, sure, Heather. Courtney goes. When it got most scary for me, if I was in your family, is when it seemed like they're not only hacking into your conversations, they can see what you're doing. Tell me about the night you were all watching American Idol like most families do in this country.

Right, yeah, we were sitting in our living room and my husband was on his cell phone and so the camera phone would have been facing the couch that I was sitting at with my two young children. My son was eating Top Ramen covered in a blanket.

The noodles.

Yeah. And they described the blanket my son was covered in. They said they wanted a bite of his Top Ramen. And they said what—

See?

Scare the heck out of you.

They said the color of my 10-year-old daughter's shirt. And they even said what it said, like a Roxy shirt. And told my husband to stop writing on the yellow legal pad.

We knew it was terrible before this, but she called me that night. She was bawling. She said, I'm losing it.

That's when I just thought—

They can see me now.

So clearly, somebody's watching. Somebody knows where you guys are. They know the colors of your cars. They know when you get out of them. And I know that you had a recent incident, Heather, at— you know, you thought it had sort of calmed down for a little bit, and just when you're trying to take a breath, it happened again.

We've tried— we've changed our phones, got new numbers. You know, it doesn't just happen at home, because I think people think we have surveillance cameras or something in our home, a bug. My daughter was babysitting, and they called. And they knew the name of the little girl she was babysitting. They said her name. She was at a local private club. Um, she wasn't even at my house. They named the club she was at. They described, um, a car in the parking lot, and when she looked up in the parking lot that she could see from the playground, she saw the orange Jeep that they'd—

but Darcy, it seems like somebody's following her around though. Is there technology Because you mentioned that your camera phone may have come on and that— do you think that that's how they're seeing what's going on?

It could be. The first night it started happening, we were at a Bible study with the girls and they would talk to the phone and say, "Wow, this is freaky. If you can hear me really, my phone number is this and that and please call me at 8:04." And that phone would ring at 8:04. So we knew they could hear through the phone. And they did that numerous times to the different girls.

But I didn't think that technology existed. I didn't know that your camera phone would come on and show the room. Robert, does that exist?

The technology certainly does exist that could monitor your activities via your cellular phone, absolutely. With global positioning and wireless cameras in the actual phones themselves, yes, it does exist. The likelihood that this is actually what's occurring, though, is slim. See, it would take somebody very sophisticated with direct access to those phones for all this to take place. So more than likely, like you said, somebody is paying unwanted attention to that them and is actually following them. And by that way, they're actually thereby getting all that data on the car in the parking lot, who they're with, and so on.

Because there you can buy scanners, I mean, like RadioShack, to listen in on cell phone conversations. It's not a cell phone, it's more of a scanner.

There are devices that you can actually use to monitor wireless radio waves, right, to intercept those communications.

Even cheap walkie-talkies, the little Play Ones, you can listen through people's—

they've done other things though, She explained how when her phone is in the seat pocket in front of her in the Suburban, we're going to Sprint store to get new phones, new numbers, everything. My niece's phone called 2 people. It rang out on speakerphone, called one person.

Never heard of that person.

I saw it. And people might say you're crazy, but we're telling the truth. And people can choose to believe it or not.

And we should point out, as you were just starting to, that, you know, because people say, well, get rid of your phones, don't use a phone, take the batteries out of your phone, change your service. You guys have changed your number how many times, Heather?

3 times. 3 times.

And have you tried getting rid of your service? Cell phones, just not touching them for days on end.

We got rid of the phones. We actually turned them over to the police.

This is another message they got about killing your pets.

Listen to this.

I know where you are. I know where you live.

I'm gonna kill X and kill P.

What are the odds though? I mean, Courtney's 16. You know how people in high school play around. This is nasty playing around though. It's not that.

We knew from day one it wasn't. We knew.

How do you know?

Because they can hear us through the microphone on the cell phone for sure. Absolutely. They've repeated things. We were outside. That's my— Ike and Plumpy are my parents. They're 70. Those are their animals, and they threatened to know where they live and kill my parents' animals. My dad's in front of the Tacoma Police Station talking into his phone. Yeah, that looks crazy. But he said, "If you can hear us, you big toad, we're after you now, and police are on it, FBI's on it, Homeland Security." They called back a minute later and said, "Yeah, we can hear you, you big toad." I mean, so I have seen things with my own eyes that other people might say are questionable, but I have seen it.

Yeah, you mentioned your dad there. We had a picture up. What does he think about this? He's 70 years old. Does he even understand?

He blames all of us in a snap of the finger.

You guys, this is very hard for you, and I know that you feel like people aren't taking this seriously to a certain extent. How nervous are you about your kids' lives? I mean, you know, we see school shootings in this country that happen far more than any of us want them to happen.

That's why we shouldn't ignore this.

And it seems very serious to me. Robert Siciliano, you know, why are people not sort of trailing this family all the time and worried that something serious is going to happen here?

Well, stalking is something that occurs every single day in this country, every single day in this world. Uh, studies show that, uh, 50% of all people suffer some form of mental illness. I mean, think about everybody that you know. Half of them are crazy, right? So, with that said, there's a lot of people out there that are paying unwanted attention to others in the form of stalking. And situations like this that happen, you have to mitigate it by obviously what you're doing, staying in touch with law enforcement, Okay, and having some form of a paper trail documenting everything that happens, paying attention to your surroundings at all times, taking self-defense classes. I mean, really empowering yourself.

Yeah, but it has to be frustrating, especially Darcy, that people— a lot of people are saying, well, come on, you need to fix this on your own, right? That, you know, a lot of people saying don't— they don't believe you.

Yeah, there's going to be skeptics. We'll just tell the truth and let them choose for themselves. We've seen it. So, um, we just hope someone can figure it out because it's Everyone carries a cell phone, and so we feel like they need to be safe.

Sprint says this technology— well, I'll show you what we contacted them and they issued a statement here. We'll put it up on the screen, Sarah, put it up. Go ahead.

We are unaware of any technology that would allow the activity portrayed in this story to occur, and Sprint continues to fully cooperate with the law enforcement agencies involving this ongoing investigation. Now, I know you guys have been trying to get Sprint to help you to try to figure out who is making these phone calls and how this is happening, and I've also spoken to detectives who say that, that there's no way for the camera to see them. Is that your understanding, Robert, or do you believe that that camera could be— I've never heard of that.

There are possibilities if you were to actually plant a virus in the firmware of the phone, which is a form of software. If she's visiting MySpace sites and somebody's targeting her via her phone, via the MySpace site, there could be a virus there. But it's not likely. If there's somebody in the neighborhood that actually has a telescope and they're paying attention, they can get all that same data as well.

Heather and Darcy, thank you for coming in and talking about this. And Robert, always a pleasure.

Thank you, Robert.