The Corner Pub

in the nature strip across the road and cut out a metre of cable. It meant the phone lines for the entire street were down.

The Real Article tended to rise above the petty games that whining adolescent boys with bruised egos could play, but this was too much. She called in Telecom Protective Services, who put a last party release on her phone line to trace the early-morning harassing calls. She suspected Blue Thunder was involved, but nothing was ever proved. Finally, the calls stopped. She voiced her suspicions to others in the computer underground. Whatever shred of reputation Blue Chunder, as he then became known for a time, had was soon decimated.

Since his own technical contributions were seen by his fellow BBS users as limited, Blue Thunder would likely have faded into obscurity, condemned to spend the rest of his time in the underground jumping around the ankles of the aristo- cratic hackers. But the birth of carding arrived at a fortuitous moment for him and he got into carding in a big way, so big in fact that he soon got busted.

People in the underground recognised him as a liability, both because of what many hackers saw as his loose morals and because he was boastful of his activities. One key hacker said, 'He seemed to relish the idea of getting caught. He told people he worked for a credit union and that he stole lots of credit card numbers. He sold information, such as accounts on systems, for financial gain.' In partnership with a carder, he also allegedly sent a bouquet of flowers to the police fraud squad - and paid for it with a stolen credit card number.

On 31 August 1988, Blue Thunder faced 22 charges in the Melbourne Magistrates Court, where he managed to get most of the charges dropped or amalgamated. He only ended up pleading guilty to five counts, including deception and theft. The Real Article sat in the back of the courtroom watching the proceedings. Blue Thunder must have been pretty worried about what kind of sentence the magistrate would hand down because she said he approached her during the lunch break and asked if she would appear as a character witness for the