Matthew Weigman

Matthew Douglas Weigman (born April 20, 1990) is a blind American man who has used his heightened hearing ability to help him deceive telephone operators and fake various in-band phone signals. Before his arrest at the age of 18, Weigman had used this ability to become a well-known phone phreaker, memorizing phone numbers by tone and performing uncanny imitations of various phone line operators to perform pranks such as swatting his rivals.

Early life Matthew Weigman was born and raised in East Boston. Legally blind due to optic nerve atrophy, he was capable of rudimentary perception of contrast in bright light.

At the age of 11, Weigman came across party lines.

First offense At the age of 14, Weigman had already gained a considerable amount of skill and knowledge about phone hacking via party lines but had not yet used these skills to do anything illegal. Weigman was not indicted for his crime, marking the beginning of a "lifelong obsession" for Weigman who performed as many as 60 other forged SWAT calls prior to his indictment. He extensively employed the use of caller ID spoofing by purchasing commercial services such as spoof cards. When Weigman's phone line was disconnected by Verizon because the phone line he was using was illegitimate, he infiltrated the Verizon phone system and used this information to harass the employee and to gain information about the status of the investigation that Verizon was conducting.

Weigman admitted that he and his allies gained unauthorized access to telecommunication companies' sensitive information to gather personal information on certain people. He also pleaded guilty to using software to modify telecommunication devices to gain free telephone service and to cut lines of other telephone subscribers.