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Online Information Dispatch
New York, December 18, 1997
By Tony Dispirado

A notorious con-woman who for the past 18 months has fooled some of the
biggest names on the Internet, the so-called Information Highway, into
believing she is an expert hacker and confidant of inner-core members of the
hacking community, has been arrested by FBI and released on bail pending a
trial to be scheduled for the New Year.

She is Carolyn P. Meinel, author of the Happy Hacker, a column which is in
fact a kind of online ^Ñhoney trap^Ò used to obtain the names and ^Ñaddies^Ò
(Internet email addresses) of potential victims, many of them naive
teenagers active in various hacking networks.

Readers contact Meinel, who uses material from previous correspondents to
portray herself as an expert hacker with insider knowledge of underground
activities. Meinel then:

Offers to help them connect to ^Ñelite^Ò groups in exchange for cash and/or
information of other members of the hacking community; and,
Sells information and data solicited from her victims to the FBI, Secret
Service and other government enforcement agencies.

However, one of her online marks was Mary Hopkins who in early July told
Meinel she was the 13-year-old daughter of the deputy head of the FBI^Òs
Washington-based Internet Security Division.

Meinel convinced the girl that in exchange for her father^Òs classified FBI
login ID and password, she would have her enrolled as a member of the
non-existent HheHeH (Happy Hacker Elite Happy Elite Hackers).

The girl subsequently passed the information to Meinel who then said she
would report the girl both to her father and to the authorities unless she
supplied further classified information and gave her [Meinel] regular
reports of her father^Òs activities.

However, ^ÑMary Hopkins^Ò was FBI Special Agent Nancy Sojurn, the lead member
of an FBI decoy team.

Meinel, known as The Banker because of her love of money, will appear on
as-yet unspecified charges.