Hacker Cinema
Compliance
2012 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Craig Zobel
On a particularly busy day at a suburban Ohio fast food restaurant, manager Sandra receives a phone call from a police officer saying that an employee has stolen money from a customer.
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4 comments on Hacker News
That has literally happened before.
Stephen Russell was in prison for fraud. He faked a heart attack so he would be brought to the hospital. He then called the hospital from his hospital bed, told them he was an FBI agent, and said that he was to be released.
The hospital staff complied and he escaped.
His life even got adapted into a movie called I Love You, Phillip Morris.
For an even more distressing example about how manipulable people are, there’s a movie called Compliance, which is the true story of a sex offender who tricked people into sexually assaulting victims for him.
I'm also in awe over the number of people who played along. This reminds me a little of the film Compliance, which I happened to see last night. I think humans are very susceptible to stories. Once a narrative gets rolling, people seem to just act out the part they invent for themselves inside whatever they perceive the story to be. The story has a life of its own.
All that aside, I thought there was little about police behavior that would surprise me. This surprised me a little. Butt-clenching as probable cause? Seriously?
The the "strip search prank call" suspect (fictionalized in the recent movie Compliance) was located through video footage of him purchasing "anonymous" phone cards with cash:
Learning that the call had been made with an AT&T calling card... they used the serial number of the calling card used to make the call, and learned that the card had come from a different [Panama City] Wal-Mart store than the card used for the Massachusetts calls. Using Wal-Mart's records of the second store, the cash register, and time of the purchase of that card, the police were able to find surveillance camera video of the transaction. Unlike the Massachusetts investigation, which had gone cold when surveillance video failed to show the purchaser because the cameras were trained on the parking lot and not the registers, the cameras at the particular store where the card used in the Mount Washington call was purchased were trained on the cashiers.
The buyer in the video was wearing a correctional officer's uniform for the private security firm Corrections Corporation of America. Video and stills from both Wal-Marts were compared and the same man was seen entering and exiting the Wal-Mart at the time of the earlier purchase. The police used this footage to produce a front-and-back composite image of the suspect, and subsequent queries to the private correctional company's human resources department led to the identification of the buyer as David R. Stewart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_prank_call_scam
I'm not sure how viable it would be in NZ, but in the strip search prank call case (as seen recently in the film Compliance), the perpetrator bought calling cards from a couple of Walmarts. They were able to trace the serial number of the card back to the stores, and comparing video from both, found the guy on film walking out of both stores. So even these prepaid credit cards might not be completely infallible.
More information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_prank_call_scam#Investigation_and_criminal_trial