A Life Wasted

Planning Second Attack

It was clear that I could no longer use the US Mail, so I first considered using couriers to deliver my next wave of fake anthrax threat letters, but quickly discounted this idea due to logistical difficulties. Sure I could pull it off and deliver some letters, but this would lack the scope I was after.

It didn't take me long to decide that Federal Express was the best carrier for my needs. At first I looked at the logistics and cost of sending a hundred overnight anthrax letters and could see that it was within my budget. One-hundred, over-night Fed-Ex letters would cost me $1,500, which wasn't a problem. But I wasn't happy with 100 letters, I was looking at 500. That would cost $7,500. Also not a problem, but a significant cost none-the-less. Yet when I began working this out in my head I realized that sending even ten like this wouldn't work. The logistics were a nightmare, but more importantly I would have to pay a clerk to send the letter, thus a witness who could identify me.

Back in the not too distant past when I had my computer business I also had an account with Fed-Ex. I briefly considered renting an office and opening a Fed-Ex account to use when a better idea struck me. I'd use someone else's account. And not just someone else's account, but the Fed-Ex account number of the organization to which I was sending the fake anthrax. After all, they would not expect something dangerous to come from the home office. I briefly considered attempting to hack Fed-Ex but knew this would be difficult and not at all a sure thing so I next thought about dumpster diving for a discarded Fed-Ex form. I looked at the dumpster of several abortion clinics and realized this too was a bad idea. For one thing their security was tight, for another they were all on the lookout for me in particular, and finally, I really didn't want to go through an abortion clinic's trash. I know this is a gross thing to say, but it is what I thought at the time.

In the world of computer hacking there is a thing called "Social Engineering." This is where you hack a company, getting otherwise secure information, by tricking an employee to tell you what you need to know. So I searched the big abortion group's web site for the name of a male employee who was likely to use Fed-Ex, wrote down his phone number and email address in case I was asked, then called Federal Express' 800 number, used the guy's name and said, "I'm out of the office and need my Fed-Ex account number." Thirty seconds later I had their account number. I repeated the process with the second large organization and now had both their Fed-Ex account numbers.

It was coming together nicely.