An in-person encounter with a hacker named Cosmo, who has infiltrated accounts on Amazon, Apple, AOL, PayPal, and AT&T. In real life he’s a 15-year-old high school dropout:
“Cosmo explained exactly how it is done.
“‘You have to add a bank account. You can make a virtual bank account on eTrade.com with info from FakeNameGenerator.com.’
“Wired verified that it’s possible to create online bank accounts with automatically generated information–although we were also required to enter a driver’s license number, which we got via a second site, using the information from FakeNameGenerator.
“‘You call PayPal, and you have to have the last four of a payment method. You can get that from Amazon or you can impersonate a PayPal agent. They access your account from the last four. You tell them you want to add a phone number, and you add a Google Voice number. And then you say, I also want to add a new bank account I just got. And they add that for you.”
Get the Longreads Weekly Email