New York Telephone: giving away personal identification numbers in a sweepstakes promotion

New York Telephone, an operating unit of the Baby Bell Nynex, was looking for a way to promote local usage of telephone credit card calls. These calls are made by dialing 0 and the recipient's telephone number, waiting for a beep, entering the caller's telephone number, and then entering a 4-digit personal identification number (PIN) used to prevent unauthorized people from charging calls to someone else's number. To promote these calls, New York Telephone created a sweepstakes with $150,000 in prizes. The winners would be selected from people who had used phone credit cards for local telephone calls between April 4 and May 31, 1994. To publicize the sweepstakes and to remind people about the PINs, which are easy to forget if they aren't used, New York Telephone mailed three million letters, each of which contained a punch-out card with the telephone customer's PIN printed on it.

People concerned with telephone fraud were aghast. Whenever any form of password security is used for bank ATMs, computer networks, or other purposes, the people who will use the passwords are sternly admonished to be careful, not to write them in the same place as their account number or phone number, and not to leave them where others can see them. And now three million letters with these numbers were sitting in mailboxes in New York. Nynex said it had reviewed the mailing materials with postal authorities and would change the PIN of anyone who complained.

Questions:

1. Use the WCA framework to organize your understanding of this case and to identify important topics that are not mentioned.

2. Explain how this case is related to the chapter's ideas about things that can go wrong with systems.

Source: Elliott, Stuart. "Phone Promotion Miscue Raises Concerns of Fraud." New York Times, Mar. 31, 1994, p. A1.

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