Phished: Roy Landis Cybercrime, #1

By Stanley Cutler

Cyber detective Roy Landis is on a mission to prove the innocence of his new lover, Tina Sigmundsdottir. Her company accused her of hacking their accounting system, fired her and threatened to have her arrested for embezzlement. She is accused of diverting payments from the accounting system into her pockets. To exonerate her, Landis unpeels a web of cyber fraud. As he closes in on the thieves, he wonders if he can "salvage" the stolen millions for himself. He's a hacker in a gray hat, a knight in tarnished armor saving a damsel in distress. He discovers that the hack was worldwide and embedded in the commercial software used by thousands of organizations worldwide. He wonders if he can "salvage" the untraceable fortune for himself. His investigation triggers a vicious murder and attempts on his life. Can he evade the killers, recover the money and prove his lover innocent of the greatest criminal exploit since the invention of the computer?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanley Cutler
• Release date: Sep 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781804430002

Stanley Cutler

Since beginning a professional writing career in 2008, Stanley Cutler has written six novels, two screenplays, dozens of newspaper columns, and a narrative non-fiction work on the rhetoric of political conventions. Away from his desk, he teaches Cyber Age Political Communication in Temple U’s OLLI program.  He volunteers as a Friend of the Library, doing his best to preserve Enlightenment values from the perils of digitized communication.  

Book preview

PART I

1

TINA

Late on a warm September afternoon, Roy Landis went down to the dumpster to toss his trash and saw discarded objects on the pavement – a lamp, a chair, a toaster oven, and two opened cardboard cartons with little things the owner no longer wanted. He was kneeling next to one of the cartons, hoping to find a treasure, when Tina Sigmundsdottir backed out through the steel basement door carrying another box of discards.

Tina had been living at Walden Park for a couple of years. Landis first met her at one of Arnie’s Saturday night parties. Thereafter, from time to time, he’d shared the elevator with her or seen her in the lobby or in the underground garage on her way to or from work, usually wearing a dark suit and carrying a briefcase. They’d exchange smiles and comments about the weather, flirting, reminding each other that they were single people of the opposite sex. She was pretty and he had entertained thoughts about asking her out. That warm afternoon, she was wearing jeans torn at the knee and a t-shirt over her long torso.

Hey, Roy, she said. Take anything you want.

Thanks, Landis replied. What’s going on?

I’m moving. I’ve got some books in here that you might like, she said, crouching to set the heavy box onto the ground. Feel free. She stood, brushing wayward strands of corn-silk hair off her damp forehead.

Where are you going?

Back to Wisconsin. Time to say goodbye to the City of Brotherly Love. Her tone was resigned, perhaps a little angry.

I thought you liked it here.

I love it here. But I can’t afford to live in Walden Park anymore, and I seriously doubt that I could find another job in this town. Behold the disgraced CPA.

I’m sorry. What happened?

She looked at him, assessing whether he was being polite or if he actually wanted to know. She said, It’s a sad story.

He sensed that she wanted to tell it. He said, I like stories. Sad or otherwise.

She gazed at him, cocking her delicate head, assessing him. In a friendlier tone, she said, I’m done for the day and ready for a drink. Come on up and I’ll tell you about it. Want a beer?

They went inside and took the freight elevator from the basement up to the sixth floor where she lived in a one-bedroom apartment. In Walden Park, there were living spaces that varied in size from studios and efficiencies on the lower floors, to one- and two-bedroom units on the middle floors, and apartments like Landis’s with as much space as small houses on the upper floors.

In Tina’s apartment, her pictures leaned against the walls, her bookshelves were barren, and packing cartons were scattered around a sofa, an upholstered wing chair, and a coffee table. She took a box off the chair and dropped it on the floor. Have a seat.

She brought two cold cans from the fridge, handed one to Landis, fell back onto the sofa and put her sneakered feet on the table.

She said, God, I hate moving.

He popped the tab and said, I know what you mean.

It’s amazing how much crap I’ve accumulated. Every move is harder than the last one. When I die, there will be a whole museum of useless stuff for someone else to throw away. Landfills and incinerators – those are the real consumers.

Landis took a swallow of the beer. So, tell me about it. What happened to you?

Long and short, I got fired. Someone using my identity got into our system at work and authorized fraudulent wire transfers using my ID. I didn’t know a thing about it, but that doesn’t seem to be the issue. I was second tier management, Roy. My boss was the CFO.

Wow. Bad news.

He said they might have me arrested for embezzlement.

What exactly happened?

Exactly, I don’t know. It started months ago. They showed me transactions from last winter with my ID that set up phony vendors in our Accounts Payable system. They even looked authentic to me, exactly like ones I entered on the accounting system all the time. But they were fake. There were wire transfers to those payees, all authorized with my ID. They say there’s no way to recover the payments. And now I’m out of a job.

When did this happen?

About a month ago – August 26 th at eight o’clock in the morning to be precise. It was horrible. I came off the elevator and was met by the head of HR, a lawyer from the legal department, and a security guard. They took me into a conference room and there was my boss waiting for me. The lawyer showed me printouts of the data entries – with my ID on them – that established the bogus payees. The HR lady handed me a trash bag and told me to clear out my office. I was escorted out the door and was back at the train station by nine. I’m still not over the shock. I’m still a wreck. I can’t sleep. Securing my identity was my responsibility, Roy. So it’s on me, dammit to hell.

She hunched her shoulders and shook her head vigorously, as if she could fling off the embarrassment. She took a long swallow, rose and went back to the kitchen for another beer. Landis, a beer snob, refused a second.

Back on the sofa, even angrier, she continued. I said a lot of nasty things that maybe I shouldn’t have. My exit wasn’t exactly graceful. Then I think I made matters worse. I tried talking to them. I called them a bunch of times, but I couldn’t get through. It was so…frustrating. Receptionists who used to ‘ma’am’ me were blocking my calls. I sent them a bunch of emails, and the last few weren’t polite. At this point I am the very definition of a disgruntled ex-employee. I’ve got a lawyer friend who thinks I should sue them for firing me without cause.

Tina did not know that he made his living in the cyber security business; he’d never had occasion to tell her. All she knew as they sat sipping cheap, canned beer was that he was a tall, friendly, thirty-something geek who lived in her building. When she had asked what he did for a living when they’d met at Arnie’s parties, Landis truthfully said that he was a network engineer. That satisfied most people, as it had Tina.

People rarely probed further. Yes, he was a network engineer, but with a particular expertise. He was a recovery specialist, a hacker who tracked down stolen money for corporate clients. If possible, he stole the money back, keeping half of whatever he recovered for himself. He enjoyed his work, not only because it was lucrative, but also because he despised cyber criminals. They were cowards who operated four snarky removes from the victims who suffered at their hands. He made a good living and punished bad guys in the process.

Clients usually came to him. But Tina’s situation was a case where, if he wanted the job, he’d have to go ask for it.

Who did you work for? he asked.

Plass-D. They make custom fittings, like aviation parts, with 3-D printers. They’re pretty big, about two hundred employees, most of them at a manufacturing plant in Ambler.

Do they have government contracts?

They supply some defense contractors, but no contracts directly with the government.

That could partially explain why the Plass-D executives came down so hard on Tina. If the parts that Plass-D made were critical to a federally funded weapons system, people from Washington might have demanded administrator rights to their network. It was a disturbing process that every company sought to avoid. He said, They might be getting a visit from Washington. The feds might already be all over them.

Really? Well that’s their problem now. I’m on a plane to Milwaukee at noon tomorrow. Goodbye Plass-D, you motherfuckers. Listen Roy, care for a joint? I’m ready to call it a day.

It was good weed. Soon, they were interrupting each other and laughing. She had a great laugh. Ten minutes after that, they were in bed.

She was enthusiastic, perhaps wanting to mark the end of a phase, to leave the terrible time behind her, to punctuate the start of a better era. To her, he assumed, he was a friendly sympathetic male with the appropriate parts, somebody who would demand nothing afterwards, someone who would validate her worth as a woman, someone she did not expect to ever see again. He stayed with her until near midnight, when he left her asleep and took the elevator up to 14E.

2

PLASS-D

Landis liked to drink his morning coffee standing up, looking out the big French window of his living room at the shiny office buildings on the horizon. The morning after Tina’s splendid farewell, the distant buildings caught the early sun like mirrors. His apartment overlooked a mile-long hardwood forest, which was odd because it was well inside Philadelphia’s city limits. The Walden Park apartments were built on a hilltop overlooking the Wissahickon Creek, which drained all of northwest Philadelphia, feeding the Schuylkill River a mile to the west of his aerie. The woodland was protected watershed, never to be developed; his view would never be obscured by buildings, a forest would always be stretching before him. Only the birds could see him.

Tina’s sad story had intrigued him. After they went to her bedroom, he had not wanted to alter the mood by bringing up her workplace tribulations. Nor had she been in the mood to talk about it.

When he awakened, alone, the next morning, he thought about Tina. In the shower, it occurred to him that her problem was a business opportunity, a job that was right up his alley. If he wanted to go after it, he thought as he was dressing, he would have to convince her former employers to engage him. Usually, the clients made the approach; he did not often have to pitch his skills. But he had nothing to lose by offering his services to Plass-D.

His first task was to learn as much as he could about the company. His workstation was in the third bedroom: four monitors, two keyboards, and a rack of six servers that accessed the internet through a cable company and a phone company, both contracts providing unlimited data and industrial bandwidth. He had a drawer in which there were several dozen flash drives on which he had preserved every malware app he had been able to download from hacked systems that he’d exposed.

His home screen showed Roy Landis Security Services in elegant white letters on a dark green field and a link to a contact form. Send him the form and he’d probably be able to locate your computer anywhere in the world to within a hundred meters. Callers to the phone number heard a recorded request to leave a message. Checking his Facebook and LinkedIn profiles yielded minimal information, not even headshots, only that he was willing to provide professional references.

Plass-D’s website displayed professional photos of their products, but none of their people. They could make anything, using more than a hundred different materials, limited only by your imagination. They would do prototypes and limited production. Or they could set up a printer on your premises so that you could manufacture the parts yourself. They had a diverse, international clientele in transportation, appliances, aerospace, and orthopedic medicine. They made objects as complex as Escher drawings or as simple as baby toys.

The website did not have an Our Team page, whereon they could have posted photos and text profiles of Plass-D’s executives – like the CFO who’d fired Tina. To find out who they were, he would have to access other sources. There was a Contact page with a ground-mail address on Market Street, and phone numbers and email addresses for the sales department, the accounting department, the engineering department, and for general inquiries.

The engineering pages had a robust quote function. If visitors to the page wanted to get an idea of how much Plass-D would charge them to make a part, they could upload their digitized drawings and answer a couple of multiple-choice questions about quantity and dimensions. The text promised that Plass-D’s engineers would respond to them within twenty-four hours. This might have been the hacker’s entry point. Allowing the upload of documents onto a website, without scrupulous security and segregation, provided a pathway to infection, perhaps the pathway to the accounting system hack.

He subscribed to several business-to-business database services, where sellers and buyers put out their signs. Sure enough, Plass-D’s top-tier executives were listed, contact with them screened by means of an info@ address. He liked the fact that a chief security officer was listed among the executives. It suggested stability. If a business wanted to buy insurance against cybercrime damages, an insurance company imposed tough cyber security requirements. The reason a lot of claims went unpaid was because the company had not complied with all of the fine print in the policy. Landis knew this well because he’d learned his trade working for an insurance company as a claims investigator. If Plass-D wasn’t willing to pay his expenses, then the insurance company might.

And there was another good sign: Plass-D was incorporated. That meant that it had stockholders who got annual reports, whether they read them or not. Claiming to be an interested investor, he sent an email to the info@ address asking for a copy of their annual shareholders’ report. By law, they could not refuse.

He telephoned the company phone number and was put through to Fred Hagedorn, the name listed as the chief financial officer in the B-to-B directory. He told the receptionist that he was calling about a recent theft of Plass-D financial assets – biz-speak for money.

When he was put through, he asked politely, Mister Hagedorn?

Yes. Who’s this? came the gruff answer.

I’m Roy Landis, a cyber fraud investigator. Tina Sigmundsdottir is a friend of mine. She told me about the theft. I’m calling to talk to you about trying to recover the money.

Say your name again?

Roy Landis. I have a website, ‘cyberroysecurity.’ He spelled it out and waited for Hagedorn to enter it on whatever computer he was using.

Hagedorn said, This doesn’t tell me anything.

It’s not supposed to. I’m in the security business – my information is mine alone. If you want to know who I am, you’ll have to talk to me. I’d like to sit down with you and discuss some ideas I have about getting the money back.

That’s not possible. We can’t get it back, I’ve been told.

I’m not talking about a lawsuit, Mister Hagedorn – I’m talking about taking it back.

Cautiously, Hagedorn said, I don’t understand.

There are ways to recover what was stolen. I have done it for many clients. I can do the same for Plass-D.

They agreed to meet in his office at ten o’clock the next morning. Hagedorn wanted to meet right away, but Landis put him off because he needed time to examine the file that had just landed in his inbox – Plass-D’s annual shareholders’ report.

Landis owned a businessman’s outfit that he kept starched and pressed in an oak wardrobe. The people wearing the pinstripes, the ones who wrote the checks, felt much better about letting go of money if they were handing it over to people who looked just like them. Landis began preparing for the metamorphosis. When called for, he could transform from a geek in a fleece to a wizard in a three-piece suit.

3

THE MEN IN CHARGE

Plass-D was in a downtown office building situated where the Chinese Wall used to be. Landis had seen pictures of the wall, an architectural nightmare that had been demolished in the 1950s: an elevated railway supported by massive blocks of sooty gray stone, and three miles of trestles that had spanned the cross streets between the Delaware and the Schuylkill rivers. A lot of locomotive traffic had run on the wall back in the days when the Pennsylvania Railroad was as rich as Microsoft. Railways still followed the same path through the center of Philadelphia, but the tracks were underground and the trains used for commuters instead of freight.

Plass-D had a suite of offices on the thirty-first floor of a building in the Penn Center complex. He gave his name to the security guard in the lobby, who called upstairs. Hagedorn came down to escort him up. He was in his fifties, a little overweight, blue shirt, striped tie, his short hair half gray. On the phone, he’d sounded younger and more fit.

Rents increase with altitude, but Plass-D could afford the lofty view. According to the shareholders’ report, they’d brought in over fifty million dollars in gross receipts the year before, the share price had risen by eight percent, and they had paid their investors a healthy dividend. Medium-sized companies in high-tech manufacturing can be profitable, but it’s a hard-knuckle game played in a fast, tough international league.

Hagedorn had an office with a view east across Center City, the towers of the Ben Franklin Bridge to Camden in the distance. Landis sat in the visitor chair at Hagedorn’s desk and waited for him to get things going.

How is Tina? Hagedorn asked formally, signaling that he didn’t really care.

Tina’s fine. She’s angry, but fine.

"She’s angry? She’s not anywheres near alone on that score. What a disaster. Why did Tina tell you about the theft?"

We’re friends. She was telling me why she got fired. I’m here strictly on my own – not on her behalf. She doesn’t know that I have any interest in the matter at all. I am here, talking to you, because I am an expert in these matters. I decided to dig into the hack when I heard her story, to see whether it was the sort of thing I specialize in. I think it is. I think I may be able to get you some of your money back. If you don’t mind my asking, what did your insurance company say? Are you covered?

No, goddammit. They say that our accounts payable system did not conform to their security requirements. They say we should have known about the fake wire requests. That’s bullshit.

Have you replaced the accounts payable system?

"Are you out of your mind? We’d have to replace the whole accounting system – it’s all integrated. We’re thinking about it, but a conversion would take months and cost a bundle. We’re looking at other packages. If we’re going to get insurance for cybercrime, we’ll most likely have to go for