There was a trick involved with this – something Ryo had figured out even before he got the encoder. Ryo had shown him how to read the data off the strip without special equipment, as a demonstration. The method was so simple even a child could do it, but Tomohiko had to admit it had taken a genius to figure it out.
For his demonstration, Ryo had prepared some magnetised iron filings. These he dusted on to the magnetic strip of the card. Tomohiko gasped.
The filings had formed themselves into a striped pattern along the strip.
‘It’s like a kind of Morse code,’ Ryo explained. ‘I did this a few times on cards I already knew the PIN to and figured out the pattern. All I had to do this time was work it in reverse. Even if you don’t know the PIN, you can read it from the pattern.’
‘So all you have to do is steal a cash card and dust some filings on it?’
‘Easy money.’
Tomohiko shook his head, speechless.
Ryo must have thought this was funny because he gave a rare belly laugh. ‘There’s nothing secure about these things at all. Those guys at the bank go on and on about how you have to keep your bank book safe and not share any personal information, but get one of these ATM cards and you might as well have the keys to the safe.’
‘And the banks don’t know about this?’
‘Oh, I’m sure a few people know they’ve got a disaster on their hands. But it’s too late to do anything about it now, so they’re keeping it to themselves. They’re just waiting for the next shoe to drop,’ said Ryo. He laughed out loud again.
Despite the potential to abuse his discovery, Ryo didn’t act on it right away. For one thing, he was busy with his software business, and for another, getting your hands on someone else’s ATM card was still difficult. After that one duplicate he made the first night, he didn’t mention cards at all for some time.
Until he had another, even bigger idea. ‘You know,’ Ryo said one day, ‘I was thinking about it and I realised, there’s no need to steal ATM cards at all.’ He was sitting at the desk in their small office, drinking a cup of instant coffee.
‘What do you mean?’ Tomohiko asked.
‘All you really need is a valid account number. You don’t even need a PIN. I’m kind of surprised I didn’t think of it sooner.’
‘Think of what?’
‘It’s like this.’ Ryo leaned back in his chair, putting his feet up on the table. He picked up a business card lying on the desk. ‘Say this is an ATM card. Put it into an ATM, and the machine reads the data on the strip, right? Now, we know that the strip contains an account number and a PIN. Of course, the ATM doesn’t know if it’s the card’s real owner putting the card in or not. That’s why it makes you input a PIN. Input the same number recorded on the magnetic strip, and it spits out your cash. So say we got a blank card, with nothing on the strip, and we fill it in with the necessary data, which is just an account number, then any PIN we want.’
Tomohiko’s eyes lit up.
‘The card is different from a real card,’ Ryo continued. ‘But the machine has no way of knowing the PIN on the card isn’t the actual PIN the customer chose. All it looks to see is whether the code on the magnetic strip is the same as the number the person punches in.’
‘So if you get someone’s bank account number —’
‘You can make a card to take their money,’ Ryo finished his sentence, the corner of his lip curling upward.
Tomohiko got goosebumps all over his body. We could really do this.
They went to work immediately.
First, they did a deeper analysis of the codes on the card. Each began with a starting code, then there was the ID code, the acknowledgment code, the PIN, and the bank identification code all in a line.
Next, they rooted through waste bins at various bank branches, picking up receipts with people’s account numbers on them, and used the patterns they had studied to encode those account numbers and PINs of their own choosing into seventy six-digit-long series of letters and numerals.
After that they used the encoder to encode these series on to magnetic strips, attached the strips to plastic cards, and they were done. The white card that Tomohiko used to withdraw money from the bank that day was their first prototype. They had chosen the account to steal from by picking the account number on the receipt that showed the largest amount of money remaining, reasoning that they’d have the best chance of the account holder not noticing a strange drop in their balance.
Though what they were doing was clearly a crime, Tomohiko felt no guilt. For one, the whole process of making the forged cards felt so much like a game, it was hard to take it too seriously. For another, they never saw the person they were stealing from. More than anything, though, it was because of something that Ryo once said.
‘Say a man throws away an apple he doesn’t want. I could come along and pick up that apple and no one would care, right? Now say he puts that apple down, meaning to eat it later. If I come along and see the apple, I might pick it up, because what’s the difference between the first and the second apple to me? None. If he isn’t watching his apple, he may as well have thrown it away. You snooze, you lose.’
The idea had wormed its way into Tomohiko’s subconscious until it felt like his own, and every time he thought about it, a wave of fear and anticipation washed over him.
Tomohiko headed straight for the office after classes ended for the day. They called it an office, but it was really a single unit in an old apartment building, which didn’t even have a sign out front.
The place held many memories for Tomohiko. The first time he came here, he could never have guessed how familiar he would become with the place.
He reached No 304, pulled the key out of his pocket, and opened the door. Ryo was sitting at the table in the small dining room immediately through the door. This was his base of operations.
‘You’re early,’ he said, twisting a little in his chair to look around.
‘I came straight here,’ Tomohiko said, taking off his shoes. ‘The noodle shop by the station was full.’
A computer sat on top of the table, an NEC PC8001. The words ‘Hello World’ were displayed on its green-tinted screen.
‘This the word processor?’ Tomohiko asked from over Ryo’s shoulder.
‘Yeah, we just got a new chip and software.’
Ryo’s hands moved over the keyboard in a blur. He would type in the regular English alphabet, but the screen displayed Japanese. Using what was called a front-end processor, it first converted letters into syllables called hiragana. When he pressed the space key, it further converted the hiragana into kanji – Japanese characters. Whenever there was a question about which character to use, the screen gave him numbered choices. The whole process took about ten seconds to produce a single word.
Tomohiko scoffed. ‘Quicker to just write it out by hand.’
‘The system is on a floppy disk, and it has to call up a database every time you convert characters, so yeah, it’s going to take time. If you could put the entire processor into memory you’d definitely get a speed boost, but this computer’s not going to be able to hack that. Still, I’m impressed with the read/write speed.’
‘Can’t say I’m going to miss cassettes much,’ Tomohiko said.
‘Yeah,’ Ryo muttered. ‘The only problem left is finding the software.’
Tomohiko picked up the 5¼-inch floppy from the desk. He knew exactly what Ryo was thinking. When they’d started selling the computer games, the response had been incredible. He remembered the breaking point, the day when the orders piled up and the money started rolling in. ‘This will be big,’ Ryo had predicted, and he was right.
Sales continued well for some time afterwards. They had made quite a bundle. And yet they had reached another impasse. They had competitors now, for one thing. But their biggest enemy was copyright law.
Until now, they had been able to sell pirated versions of popular games like Space Invaders openly through ads, but t
he writing on the wall was clear that this would no longer fly. There were movements to penalise software copiers. Some companies had already been served with a legal notice, and their own company had already received a warning by mail.
‘If any of these cases go to trial, they’re going to ban copying programs,’ Ryo predicted. The US had already enacted copyright reform in 1980. Programs were now ‘a unique expression of the intellectual thought and creative expression of their creator’, and copying them was a crime.
With that business model gone, the only way they could keep going was to make programs themselves. Yet they lacked both the necessary capital and the know-how to make that happen.
‘Oh right, here,’ Ryo said, and pulled an envelope out of his pocket.
Tomohiko looked inside. The envelope held eight ten-thousand-yen bills.
‘Your share from today,’ Ryo said.
Tomohiko tossed the envelope, cramming the bills into his jeans pocket. ‘What’s our next play?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know…’
‘With the ATM card?’
‘Yeah.’
Ryo crossed his arms. ‘If were going to try to make any money off of that, we better be quick about it. Waste too much time, and they’ll come up with countermeasures.’
‘The zero-PIN system, was it?’
‘Right.’
‘But that’s going to cost them a ton.’
Ryo looked up at him. ‘You think we’re the only ones who’ve found the weak spot in ATM cards? Pretty soon what we did today will be happening all over the country. Then even the stingy banks will have to do something.’
‘Yeah…’ Tomohiko sighed.
A zero-PIN ATM card was just what the name suggested: a card with no personal identification number recorded on its magnetic strip. Instead, a customer’s PIN was stored remotely, and each time they wanted to use their ATM card, the machine would have to contact the bank’s central computer to verify the transaction. Though it was much slower and more expensive for the banks than the old way, it made their system for forging cash cards obsolete.
‘What we did today was too dangerous, anyway. Even if we were able to fool the security cameras every time, we’d eventually slip up somewhere,’ Ryo said.
‘Yeah,’ Tomohiko agreed. ‘Not to mention people going to the police when they notice their balance —’
‘Ideally,’ said Ryo, cutting him off, ‘we want to make it so they don’t even know we’re using forged ATM cards.’
It was clear Ryo was already thinking about the next scheme, but that was as far as he got when the doorbell rang. They exchanged glances.
‘Namie?’ Tomohiko asked.
‘She wasn’t supposed to come today. That, and she should still be at the bank,’ Ryo checked his watch. ‘Whatever. Go see who it is.’
Tomohiko walked up to the door and looked through the peephole. A man in grey overalls stood outside. He looked around thirty years old.
Tomohiko opened the door a crack. ‘Yes?’
‘Uh, hi,’ the man said, a blank, bored look on his face. ‘Building maintenance. I’m here to check on the ventilation fans.’
‘You have to do this right now?’
The man nodded without saying anything. There’s a worker bee if I ever saw one, Tomohiko thought, closing the door to undo the chain.
When he opened the door again, the number of people outside had multiplied. A large man in a navy blue jacket, and a younger man wearing a green suit were standing right in front of the door. The man in the overalls had stepped back behind them. Sensing danger, Tomohiko tried to shut the door, but the big man put his hand out to stop it from closing.
‘We’ll be coming in,’ the big man announced.
‘Who the hell —’ Tomohiko said as the man forced his way inside. The breadth of his shoulders was impressive, and there was a faint citrus smell clinging to the fabric of his clothes.
The man in the green suit followed close behind. He had a scar next to his right eyebrow where it looked like he’d got stitches for a cut.
Ryo looked up without standing from the table. ‘And you are?’
The big man didn’t answer. He stepped in without taking off his shoes, took a look around the room, then planted himself in the chair Tomohiko had been sitting in a moment before.
‘Where’s Namie?’ the man asked Ryo, a mean look in his eyes. His jet-black hair was smoothed back across his head.
‘Can’t say,’ Ryo said, shrugging. ‘Who’s asking?’
‘Where’s Namie?’
‘Did you need her for something?’
The big man glanced back at the one in the green suit, who came forward, also wearing his shoes, and went straight into the back room. The big man’s eyes went to the computer on the table. He stared at the screen a moment. ‘What’s that?’
‘A Japanese word processor,’ Ryo said.
The man grunted and seemed to lose interest immediately. He resumed looking around the room. ‘You make much money doing this?’
‘If you do it right,’ Ryo said.
The man chuckled, his shoulders rocking. ‘Looks like you’re not doing it right, then, huh.’
Ryo and Tomohiko exchanged glances.
The green suit was poking through their cardboard boxes. The back room had been converted into a storeroom.
‘If you’re looking for Namie, you should try coming on Saturday or Sunday. She’s not usually here during the week.’
‘We know,’ the man said, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his vest pocket. He stuck one in his mouth and lit it with a Dunhill lighter.
‘You hear from her lately?’ he asked, blowing smoke.
‘Not today. Would you like me to give her a message if she calls?’
‘No need.’
The man was about to flick ash from his cigarette on to the table, when Ryo quickly stuck out his hand to catch the ash.
The man raised an eyebrow. ‘You trying to prove something, kid?’
Ryo shook his head. ‘We have a lot of electronics here. I don’t want ash getting into anything.’
‘So get an ashtray.’
‘I don’t have one.’
The man’s face twisted into a cruel smile. ‘Oh?’ he said, tapping more hot ash into Ryo’s open palm. Ryo didn’t flinch. ‘I say you do.’ He jabbed the lit end of his cigarette into Ryo’s palm.
Tomohiko could see every muscle in Ryo’s body tense, but his face remained blank. His hand remained motionless above the table as he stared the man in the eyes.
‘You’re a tough guy, is that it?’ the man asked.
‘Not particularly.’
‘Suzuki,’ the man called into the back. ‘You find anything?’
‘Nothing,’ the green suit replied.
The man put his cigarettes and his lighter back into his pocket, then he picked up a ballpoint pen and wrote something on the corner of a software manual that was lying open on the table.