back to article BT offers £15,000 to catch London exchange burglary gang

BT is offering a reward of £15,000 to anyone with information on a burglary at an exchange in Stepney, East London that took down phone and internet communications for homes and businesses. The thieves are also being linked to other similar burglaries in the capital. Raiders hit the Stepney Green exchange on Commercial Road …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I hope they get them...

    This is far from a victimless crime, cost to customers aside, what if someone needed to make a 999 call?

  2. Gareth
    Paris Hilton

    Obass card

    I've lost hundreds of hours trying to gain access to BT exchanges, how have these people managed it? They should get the £15k as a reward and to share their secret.

    - Paris because I bet her Obass card works first time every time

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Fencing?

    >"The bagged nine 21CN network cards costing thousands of pounds each."

    Who the hell can they be planning on selling them to? Surely nobody but BT uses them...

  4. Matt

    responsibility

    "... the persons responsible for this irresponsible crime ..." ???

    Oh wait, this is the Plod speaking.

  5. Colin Millar
    Coat

    About bloody time

    Someone needs to put a stop to all these Guy Ritchie films. Wouldn't have thought BT would be doing the investigating though. Oh well - I suppose Mr Plod is too busy with his RIAA sub-contracting work.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    BT need to get used to it.

    When phorm goes titsup the liquidators will be pulling those exchanges apart.

  7. Sam

    Mac code?

    The first time these cards show up online, won't their mac addresses give them away?

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    BTs monopoly lead to this affecting so many people

    "This type of incident can cause real disruption to the telephone network and deprive people of the use of their telephones and computers. It is essential the persons responsible for this irresponsible crime are brought to justice and prevented from committing similar acts in the future."

    I don't expect a policeman to comment on the ins and outs of the UK comms infrastructure, or the ecomonics of modern communications, but lets be honest, this break in wouldn't have caused half the disruption it did had it not been for the monopolistic position BT still holds in this country.

    It certainly doesn't justify the break in, but if there was more than BT (and in places Virginmedia) available for our comms then the prices would be lower all round and the entire infrastructure would be more resiliant to attack.

    If you have ever bitched about BT but also ever supported Thatcher, Major or Blair then you have no one but yourself to blame for the shocking state of communications in this country.

    :EndOfRant

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    title

    nice to see that you cant just walk in an take stuff, oh wait they did ;)

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    Mayfair TE...

    ... is the worst TE I have worked in! The 2nd worst is Abbey TE, i.e. the Prime Minister's local TE.

  11. Peter Simpson
    Pirate

    Look for the buyer

    So, these items probably wouldn't be much use to anyone but another telephone exchange, would they? I mean, they don't improve your home phone service, or make your stereo or microwave work any better, right?

    So who's buying them? And I assume they have serial numbers on them, so any maintenance calls would pop up a red flag at the manufacturer's service facility.

  12. b
    Pirate

    wow $15,000?

    yeah that should bring in some leads..^^

    have to say ( i used to live round the corner from this exchange, in globe road in stepney), the commercial road is one of the busiest in london..you have to marvel at the functioning grey matter in deciding to give this blag a go!

    cheers,

    bill

    p.s. stuff and nonsense: http://www.eupeople.net/forum

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Fencing

    >Who the hell can they be planning on selling them to? Surely nobody but BT uses them...

    Banking, VISA etc is moving on to 21CN - roque applications in those directions would be my guess - clearly not the plods with such low reward.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    the stolen kit is useless....

    ....to anyone else but BT, unless they are building an exchange... so if the kit IS being sold as a complete card, then it will be going abroad...

    but more likely, the cards are being stripped for the components that are still worth a lot of money..

    the people stealing this kit will already have a buyer in place, or more likely, the people who want the kit has recruited the people to do the break in for them...

    mines the one with the RS components catalog in the pocket !!!

  15. Outcast
    Paris Hilton

    Value added features

    Forgive me if I'm speaking out of my bum but..

    Couldn't these stolen items be fettled to add some cyber crime additions... then at a later date be swapped back ?

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    @ outcast

    maybe that is what they already did, and just took some other cards as a smokescreen?

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    I think I saw Del-Boy in the area...

    ...and a yellow 3 wheeled car...

  18. Fred

    @ Obass card

    Its S5 these days man... come one, get with the times!

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    The biggest thieves round BT that I know of

    are on the BT board.

    Yes, I know it was predictable. But it needed to be said.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    They can have there gear back ....

    When they make an announcement to the effect in all the major daily papers that there completely dropping Phorm.

    Deal?

  21. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Freedom Fighters

    Personally I take this and similar incidents in a completely different manner to the official line that it was just theives that deceided to break into an exchange or two to make a quite profit.

    I would say it is more likely that members of the English population have had just about all they can take from BT. As over the last decade we (the Englaish nation) have had to put up with an continual stream of bad service, deliberate misrepresentation and deception, fraud, forgery, harassment, general spamming and bad manners from BT, it would seem quite likely that certain members of the community are likely to retailiate in kind.

    For example once you reaslise that BT having been gaining unauthorised accesses to our computer systems for the last decade to flood us with their unwanted spam, even after repeated requests to control their behaviour, is it that difficult to see that parts of the English population may feel like repaying BT in kind with unauthorised accesses to their equipment exchanges and is it too far to streach you imagination to think that if BT have been conducting Denial of Service attacks against our infrastructure, that some may retailate in kind. If you think about it these attacks are nothing more than Permenant Denial of Service attacks against BT's infrastructure, with the added bonus of liberating some possibly resaleable equipment.

    If i was a BT Director I would take this as a warning of what could be to come.

    So shouldn't the question really be, who have BT pissed off recently?

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