At 4 in the morning of May 1, 2005, deputies from the El Paso County Sheriff's Office converged on the suburban Colorado Springs home of Richard Gasper, a TSA screener at the local Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. They were expecting to find a desperate, suicidal gunman holding Gasper and his daughter hostage.

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"I will shoot," the gravely voice had warned, in a phone call to police minutes earlier. "I'm not afraid. I will shoot, and then I will kill myself, because I don't care."

Matt's phone friends — some of whom had being trying to get Rosoff and his associates arrested for years — cautioned Matt to steer clear of the group. But the teen was cocky and arrogant, and was swept in by Rosoff's goading, even coming to believe he was invulnerable to prosecution. "They told him things like, 'You don't have to worry about this, you're a blind kid, you're a minor,'" says Lotus. "They would feed this kid this bullshit, and eventually he'd start to believe it."

The gang specialized in serving up trouble to people who defied them on the party lines. Their most common tactic was swatting. Using a commercial caller ID spoofing service called SpoofCard , they'd call police departments around the country with false alarms, triggering tense confrontations between armed cops and the victims, at least two of whom have suffered injuries.

It was, relatively speaking, mild stuff. The teen though, soon fell in with a bad crowd. The party lines were dominated by a gang of half-a-dozen miscreants who informally called themselves the "Wrecking Crew" and "The Cavalry." The group was led by a 40-year-old Cleveland ex-con named Stuart Rosoff, a.k.a. "Michael Knight," and Guadalupe Santana Martinez, Jr., a.k.a., "Wicked Wizard."

Matt says he ordered phone company switch manuals off the internet and paid to have them translated into Braille. He became a regular caller to internal telephone company lines, where he'd masquerade as an employee to perform tricks like tracing telephone calls, getting free phone features, obtaining confidential customer information and disconnecting his rivals' phones.

Perhaps grateful to have a worthy protégé to receive his knowledge, Daniels didn't give much thought to how Matt would use it. "I don't sit down and say, 'Hey Matt, I'm going to teach you how to infiltrate such-and-such,'" Daniels says. "The conversation starts with a discussion about how equipment operates."

"We're enemies at this time," says Daniels, a 36-year-old Alabama man who runs one of the party lines. "And he's telling me in this little 12-year-old sounding voice what he's going to do to me." He laughs. After Matt lost a phone war with Daniels, the elder phone phreak became Matt's closest friend and mentor, schooling him in the ins-and-outs of the phone system.

Matt started asking questions about phone phreaking, learning a little. The party lines are a gladiator school of mischief, and Matt began challenging experienced phone hackers with the obscenity-laced bravado of a teenage boy feeling power for the first time.

Blind hackers were a part of the first generation of phone phreaks in the 1970s, and it's easy to see the draw. On the phone, Matt's handicap is irrelevant, and his gifts — which include his ironclad memory, and vocal skills that can mimic a much older man, or masquerade as a woman — make him an impresario. A party line denizen called "Lotus" remembers the first time he encountered Matt at a Boston conference. "He was sitting in the room beat-boxing. And I was like, who's playing the drums in here? And it was just Li'l Hacker."

"I've been interested in phones since I've been about 8," says Matt, who lives with his single mother, and older brother and younger sister in an East Boston apartment. "I talked to technicians when they came down here to do things on my phone."

Like those early conferences, modern party lines are also home to a small cohort of phone phreaks — hackers who specialize in telephone systems. It's a subculture that immediately appealed to Matt.

While similar to online, text-based chat rooms, the party lines are actually an echo of a much older phenomenon that began in the early 1980s with home-brew phone conferences boasting anywhere from two to eight call-in lines. Today's computerized party lines offer virtually limitless capacity, and include features like multiple "rooms" for different groups to congregate.

Matt appeared on the phone phreaking scene in late 2004, when a neighbor gave him the number of a telephone party line called the Boston Raven. Party lines are privately run telephone-conferencing facilities where people from around the country dial in and socialize, forming friendships, romances and, at times, bitter enemies.

It's as though the phone companies — which enjoy notoriously close relations with the feds — are so adept at getting their hackers arrested that they're little motivated to spend money securing their sprawling infrastructures. If malicious phone phreaks were the only threat to telecom customers, that might be a sound strategy. But as the pretexting scandals of 2006 showed, the same vulnerabilities make things easy for snoops and criminals of all stripes, and a report released this week tallying identity theft complaints ranks AT&T and Sprint customers as the second and third most victimized, respectively.

The holes he's exploiting are in large part the same ones a previous generation of phreaks relied on. He's running variations of the same old scams. Daniels notices this as well. "He is nasty as the day is long because he knows a few tricks from the old days," he says.

Interviews by Wired.com with Matt and his associates, and a review of court documents, FBI reports and audio recordings, paints a picture of a young man with an uncanny talent for quick telephone con jobs. Able to commit vast amounts of information to memory instantly, Matt has mastered the intricacies of telephone switching systems, while developing an innate understanding of human psychology and organization culture — knowledge that he uses to manipulate his patsies and torment his foes.

Innocent at first, Matt's worst instincts surfaced after he fell in with a gang of telephone ruffians — men as old as 40 — who eventually fingered the teenager when they were swept up in an FBI crackdown on swatters late last year. The government says the gang launched swatting attacks in over 60 cities, leaving hundreds of victims and chalking up over $250,000 in losses.

"Who's the best out there?" says Jeff Daniels, a veteran phone hacker and an admitted mentor to Matt. "The little blind kid is one of the best. And that's a fact."

If he's guilty, the attack is at once the least sophisticated and most malicious of a string of capers linked to Matt, who stumbled into the lingering remains of the decades-old subculture of phone phreaking when he was 14, and quickly rose to become one of the most skilled active phreakers alive.

Now the FBI thinks it has identified the culprit in the Colorado swatting as a 17-year-old East Boston phone phreak known as "Li'l Hacker." Because he's underage, Wired.com is not reporting Li'l Hacker's last name. His first name is Matthew, and he poses a unique challenge to the federal justice system, because he is blind from birth.

A federal Joint Terrorism Task Force would later conclude that Gasper had been the victim of a new type of nasty hoax, called "swatting," that was spreading across the United States. Pranksters were phoning police with fake murders and hostage crises, spoofing their caller IDs so the calls appear to be coming from inside the target's home. The result: police SWAT teams rolling to the scene, sometimes bursting into homes, guns drawn.

But instead of a gunman, it was Gasper himself who stepped into the glare of police floodlights. Deputies ordered Gasper's hands up and held him for 90 minutes while searching the house. They found no armed intruder, no hostages bound in duct tape. Just Gasper's 18-year-old daughter and his baffled parents.

Though Danielle doubted his claim that he was only 15, and blind (she thought he could be as old as 20), Hacker Matt seemed like a nice guy, she later told investigators. But as she spoke with him twice a day for about a week, he became less nice, and started pressing her for phone sex.

Their relationship soured for good when the family phone rang at 3 a.m. on May 1 of that year, a few hours before Richard Gasper was scheduled to start his shift as a screener at the Colorado Springs Municipal Airport. Hacker Matt asked for Danielle, who was asleep in the other room. "I want to have phone sex with her," the caller told Gasper.

Gasper called the man a pervert and hung up, perhaps thinking that ended the matter. But Hacker Matt was persistent. "What's the matter?" Gasper asked on the next call. "Can't you get sex from a real woman?" On the fourth call, the caller threatened to "knock the dimple off" Danielle's chin and to "blow up the fucking airport with (Gasper) in it."

Minutes after the Gaspers hung up on Hacker Matt for the fifth time, the phone rang at the Colorado Springs Police Department. A recording of the call was obtained by Wired.com.

"Now listen here," the caller growled. "I've got two people here held hostage, all right? Now you know what happens to people that are held hostage. It's not like on the movies or nothing, all right? You understand that?"

"OK," the female dispatcher replied calmly.

"One them here's name is Danielle, and her father."

Identifying himself as John Defanno, the caller claimed to be armed with a .22 caliber handgun, and said the hostages were duct-taped, and the father injured. "Defanno" warned dispatchers not to send armed police into the house. "I will shoot," he said. In an effective touch, he seemed to address someone in the room "Shut up!" he barked.

The Sheriffs Office responded quickly. They called Gasper's number, and Gasper told them about the phone calls and the bomb threat. But they didn't believe him. Shortly after 4 a.m., deputy sheriffs showed up at his house, ostensibly to take a report. When Gasper stepped outside to meet them, he was taken into custody while police stormed the house. His daughter and his parents were inside, but, of course, there was no gunman.

The next day, Gasper's phone was mysteriously forwarded to the FBI's office in Washington DC.

In the aftermath of the swatting, Karl Mai, a deputy sheriff detailed to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Colorado Springs, started looking for Hacker Matt. Adam Panagia, the head of AT&T's fraud division, passed on a tip from an informant that Li'l Hacker had been heard bragging about the Gasper swatting. But the investigation petered out after two months.

In two phone interviews with Wired.com, Matt was evasive and taciturn. He spouted angrily about the crimes committed by other party liners, particularly Rosoff and Martinez, but declined to answer questions about his own activities. He denies making any swatting calls.

But Daniels says Matt, particularly in his younger days, was capable of unleashing hell on his perceived enemies. "You don't have a clue," says Daniels. "He was a raving lunatic … He could decide he doesn't like you, and he could make your life a living hell, and there's nothing you could do about it."

"I give that guy props, but in some respects he's not smart enough for his own IQ," says Jered Morgan, a phone phreak known as Lucky225.

Unlike Rosoff and the others, though, Matt seemed to develop some restraint as he grew more skilled. Instead of sending police out to people's houses, or phoning Child Protective Services with false abuse reports, Matt spent more of his time calling internal phone company numbers and flexing his growing access to phone company systems.

According to the government, between August and October 2006 Matt logged more than 50 pretext phone calls to Verizon's provisioning center in Irving, Texas. He also told party liners that he could eavesdrop on calls on Verizon's network with the help of a credulous employee.

Verizon admits to suffering some breaches, but emphasizes that it was purely indirect. "No one has literally accessed a Verizon computer, but there has been social engineering taking place," says Verizon spokesman William Kula.

Li'l Hacker caught on tape. The blind hacker calls in a disconnect order on an enemy's phone. https://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/archive/images/article/full/2008/02/little_hacker_social.mp3 To hack AT&T, Matt boldly adopted the identity of a real phone company security agent named William Jones. In a series of undated recordings obtained by Wired.com, Matt is heard repeatedly phoning AT&T's internal help desk to get workers to disconnect the phone of Kenneth McComas, a party line rival who lives in Ohio. "We're looking at a fraud account," he said in one call, affecting a confident baritone. "We're just gonna have to take that out of there." While the worker processed the order, Matt kept him engaged in jocular small talk thick with camaraderie. His enthusiasm sometimes chaffed other hackers. At one point, Matt allegedly hacked into a Verizon recorded-announcement system that tells callers when a number has been disconnected or changed. Other hackers were exploiting the system for more subtle pranks, until Matt stomped over the recordings with his own voice. "If you called any number that was not in service, you would hear him say some weird shit," says Teli Brown, a former phone hacker known as "Gray Area." "It was funny, but it ruined it." By then, Matt's reputation had taken on a life of its own, and tales of some of his hacks — perhaps apocryphal — are now legends. According to Daniels, he hacked his school's PBX so that every phone would ring at once. Another time, he took control of a hotel elevator, sending it up and down over and over again. One story has it that Matt phoned a telephone company frame room worker at home in the middle of the night, and persuaded him to get out of bed and return to work to disconnect someone's phone. To Matt's family, the teen's interest in telephony seemed harmless. His 18-year-old brother would read him articles on hacking, according to Lotus. And while Matt was on the party lines, his mother, Amy, could sometimes be heard in the background playfully imitating his frequent pose as an AT&T technician. "I think that she has concerns," says a Boston phone phreak who was Matt's only real-life friend from the party lines. "She's like, 'Don't get yourself into trouble.' But I know that she also respects Matt's interest. She knows that it makes him happy, and she's proud of how much Matt's learned." (Amy could not be reached for comment, and the family's lawyer did not return repeated phone calls).

The Boston phone phreak, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of FBI attention, is the only party liner to meet Matt in person. In the summer of 2006, he showed up at Matt's home to intercede in a brewing confrontation between Matt and another Boston party liner. The visitor chatted with Matt's family for a few minutes, before meeting Matt, a heavyset kid with a shaved head. The visit was a rare incursion into Matt's real life from the phone world, and Matt was shaking with nervousness. "I showed up unexpected, and he didn't know what was going on when I rang the bell," says the phone phreak. "But after a few minutes he calmed down." On another day, the Boston phone phreak met up with Matt at an East Boston plaza while Matt's mother was shopping. Often brusque and abusive on the party lines, "in person, he's a very friendly guy," the phone phreak says. "Easy to get along with and have a conversation with." The friends hacked on a pay phone for an hour-and-a-half. But the Boston phone phreak eventually distanced himself as Matt became more involved with Stuart Rosoff and the other swatters — a relationship characterized by posturing and mutual harassment. "Stuart E. Rosoff is going get on his knees and suck my pole, dude," Matt taunted one day, in a recorded party line conversation. "He cut my phone off three times today … But I got it back on, three times." "You won't get it back on any more," Rosoff responded, incorrectly. Poll: How Good Is the Blind Hacker? Mitnick Weighs In Matt's roughhousing with the swatters alarmed his party line friends, who'd become protective of the sharp-tongued teen. When Rosoff began harassing Matt's mother, another phone phreak sent $800 to help the family move. Their new location didn't stay a secret for long, though. "He moved, literally, right around the block," says Lotus. "He had his phone all rigged so it was showing different locations, and they still tracked him down. They started to harass him again and sucked him back in." But time was running out for the swatters. They'd gotten away with their harassment in large part because each individual swatting call was considered a minor, local offense — a misdemeanor in some jurisdictions. No law enforcement agency had ever stitched them all together. Then, on Oct. 1, 2006, Martinez staged a swatting attack against Stephanie Proulx, a female party line participant in Fort Worth, Texas. When police arrived, expecting to find a shooting in progress, a detective on the scene realized he'd already been to the apartment on an earlier false emergency call. He interviewed Proulx, who told him all about Rosoff, Martinez and other members of the gang. Martinez had even swatted her father in Cleburne, Texas. The detective called in the FBI. Special agent Allyn Lynd, from the FBI's nine-person Dallas cyber-crime squad, began an investigation. A West Point graduate and a veteran of the Global Hell defacement gang prosecutions of the late 1990s, Lynd phoned up corporate security officers at Verizon and AT&T, who had been tracking the party liners for years. Verizon sent Lynd their file on Li'l Hacker, complete with call logs showing Matt phoning a variety of internal Verizon offices, including RCMAC, an office responsible for entering commands directly into telephone switches. AT&T security agent Gary Beaulieu had a hotter tip: He told Lynd about Rosoff, who at that very moment was serving time for telephone harassment in a county jail in Cleveland. Lynd booked a flight to Ohio. Before he left he ran a check through the FBI's computers for incidents similar to the Proulx case. He found the 2005 Colorado Springs case linked to "Hacker Matt," and contacted Karl Mai to see if he had any questions for Rosoff. Mai had a request, according to a task force report on the case. "Any information developed as to the real identity of Hacker Matt would be helpful." On Nov. 21, 2006, Lynd and a partner interviewed Rosoff in jail. The details of the conversation are hard to come by, but court records indicate that on that day, Lynd obtained a new confidential informant. The informant provided ample details about the swatting incidents, naming Martinez, a New York man named Chad Ward, and Jason Trowbridge, a bill collector who'd used his access to a consumer database to get information on the gang's targets. The anonymous informant, Lynd admitted in an affidavit, "has been accused by members of the party lines as being engaged in telephone harassment." The informant also gave Lynd something the FBI had been looking for since 2005: the real name of Little Hacker. Two weeks later, the FBI held the first of several meetings with Matt in the East Boston apartment, while his worried mother looked on. The teenager proved to be a fount of information on Rosoff's and Martinez's actions, but he became evasive when the feds asked him about his own hacking. "They asked, hey, are you able to drop in on lines?" Matt recalls. "And I told them, I'd rather not talk about things like that." Lynd began grooming Matt as a confidential informant, a path that would make it easy to let the teen emerge relatively unscathed from the looming swatting prosecutions. But the phone companies Matt so effortlessly manipulated were less forgiving of the blind teenager. AT&T investigator Gary Beaulieu began monitoring the phone numbers Matt called. When Beaulieu saw Matt dial into a party line just a few days after the hacker made a deal with the FBI, the phone cop called in to listen. He heard another phone phreak describe a new way to forward somebody's phone without their knowledge using a particular AT&T facility. Matt's phone was soon seen calling the AT&T number. Beaulieu passed the information onto Lynd, and Matt was in hot water again. Prosecutor Linda Groves called Matt's attorney, and warned that if Matt continued to hack the phone companies, he'd lose his status as a protected informant. Matt agreed to record some phone calls with Rosoff's crew for the FBI, and in January he turned over four cassette tapes filled with calls. But he didn't stop hacking. By February, the FBI had formally revoked his status as a confidential informant, and began planning for his indictment. Lynd told Mai that Matt couldn't stop hacking for more than 72 hours. Daniels agrees, but says his protégé can't help himself. His entire world is on the telephone.