Social Engineering Explained: Alex Kasper on the Hotel Device Scam from Freedom Downtime

Excerpted from the Freedom Downtime (2001) DVD extras, this clip shows him walking Emmanuel Goldstein of 2600 Magazine through a social-engineering technique: call a company claiming to be an employee whose equipment broke down at a convention, have “a replacement” shipped to a hotel under the employee’s name, collect it as a “messenger,” then cancel the hotel reservation — no signature, no trace.

The video’s description highlights Kasper’s prediction at the end of the clip — “In ten years, we’re gonna have hundreds of thousands of little kids for who this is nothing” — and notes that the authentication-before-shipping fix he proposes remains standard security advice today.