Pirates_Ghost

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Prank calls are nothing new for the famously named Bill Clinton of North Little Rock, but never had they been as scary - or as high-tech - as this one.

Clinton, who is not related to the former president and Arkansas governor of the same name, was the victim of a dangerous prank late last month when another person used a computer to hack into a caller-ID system and hijack Clinton's home number.

After hacking into a computer system in a process called "caller-ID spoofing," the as-yet unidentified caller made several calls to Clinton's home Jan. 29, telling Clinton's son he was going to disturb all the neighbors with calls that would appear to come from Clinton.

The prankster then called police to make it look like it was Clinton calling, said he had a gun to someone's head and hung up. That caused armed officers to besiege Clinton's home.


Clinton had been sleeping, but his son had received the crank calls, including one saying the police were on the way. Clinton went outside to meet the police, who discovered that several calls were recorded on Clinton's own caller-ID system as having come from his own phone. That's when they realized somebody had hacked into the computer system and impersonated Clinton's telephone identification code.

Computer experts say that few people know about "spoofing" programs, which are available on the Internet and were developed so that telemarketers can bypass caller-ID systems. Coskun Bayrak of the computer science department at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock said wider knowledge of "spoofing" could encourage copycats, but could also pressure the software industry to develop improvements to cover the loopholes.

Clinton said he's received bomb threats and harassing telephone calls before, "presumably because his name is William Clinton and he lives in the Little Rock area," the police report said.

Police haven't found the culprit, but reviewed Clinton's phone records and found one suspicious call from Winterville, N.C., before the series of calls disguised as coming from Clinton's phone. The owner of the phone in North Carolina told Winterville police that she too had been victimized by the crank caller.

The spoofer called again later the night of Jan. 29, after the police left, to see if the police had shown up. When Clinton mentioned they had an inkling the caller was from Winterville, the line went dead and the person hasn't called back, Clinton said.

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You can't wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you - Look, if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor, just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!