How Telephone Phreaking Worked

I remember in the 1995 movie Hackers starring Angelina Jolie, each hacker had their own specialty hack that they were really good at. The character Ramon Sanchez specialty was payphone phreaking. He carried around a tape recorder with dial tones playing on it and would put it up to the payphone receiver to call other hackers.

Texas has 10 different area codes for one metropolitan area while my home of Nebraska has just two for the whole state. 402 for the CST area, 531 for the GMT area.

I've been watching this one for the second time.
That would be nice if you could do a longer version on the chanel.

1 phreak 2 phreak 3 phreak 4...

So, if all you had to do was hold a recording to the receiver to trick the phone company into thinking you deposited a quarter; could they hear everything when the handset was "off the hook"? or even hung up? Was the microphone always active?

Back in the day, they had phone numbers like KL-4532 and you dial K L 4 5 3 2 and KL might stand for Klondike, the local area you were calling. That’s why the letters were on the dial. Long-distance you had to dial the operator.

What about those crank phones? The crank would dial the operator and then you tell the operator what number you wanted to reach.

To go really primitive, when I was a kid I made a Dixie cup phone. Punch a small hole in the bottom of two Dixie cups feed a long string in, and tie a knot in the end, so it won’t pull through. (The knot goes on the inside.) then thread the other end of the string into the bottom of the other Dixie cup, and tie a knot in that end of the string. When you pull it tight, one person can talk in one end, and the other person can listen at the other end, and vice versa.

Thank you, kindly, if you made it to the end of this comment. 😂

In the UK, the national phone company (BT) would sell pre-paid phone cards and you could carry them around in your wallet - this was great since you didn't have to carry a load of coins. The cards didn't have magnetic strips (I guess either producing the cards was too expensive since they were single use, or equipping all the phone boxes with readers would have been too costly) but instead a "scratch strip". The phone box would mark a vertical line "scratch" in the card to mark that part as used. Whilst you couldn't just fill in the gaps again, you could put a couple of layers of hair spray over the strip, which would cause that to be scratched instead, rather than the card itself. After, you could just wipe it clean and re-apply for more free calls.

I remember how it worked...

Love it. I was born in 1990 so I was on the tail end of landlines being the big thing. This would have been so fun to do as a kid. Though, I certainly didn’t have a bunch of friends outside my neighborhood to call lol.

Ooft. The static noise in this is rough.

I had a friend who had the ultimately pimped out TI-994A because all the peripherals had vastly dropped in cost. He could call people and have the computer talk to them because voice synth was so easy with it.

I dont have a landline anymore

Darth vader on a unicycle playing bagpipes?! INSTANT LIKE!

Ive been putting off watching this for two years because the thumbnail didn't appeal to me. I am so glad I finally did

Portland is a shit hole now.

One of my favorite phreaking stories involved payphones. Well more specifically payphone lines. A guy found out that the phone company would reimburse cocot payphone line owners $0.22 (i don't know why it wasn't a full quarter) for 1-800 numbers dialed from a payphone. I believe there were government funds involved in this process. Anyway the reason this existed was because calling cards were just becoming wildly popular, so this program was implemented as a way to save payphone owners. So anyway the guy rents out some shoddy low rent commercial space something and gets half a dozen payphone lines installed (no phones though). He hooks the lines into a computer with a bunch of modems and had it sit there and dial 1-800 numbers all day, every day. I think by the time they caught him, he had racked up $250,000 in reimbursements.

I am incapable of reading the title of this video in anything but the voice of Napoleon Dynamite.

This was the coolest most fascinating video ive seen in ages. My personal ethic is that I will pay for a game if its reasonably priced. Indie games are fairly priced more often than not. Lots of the big name developers charge ridiculous amounts of money for their sub standard games that are all realistic graphics and no substance. 4 hours of campaign is not good enough for 60 euro. Yo ho ho. Power to the people.

Is it bad that I’m not that surprised someone asked you to sign their hentai magazine?

I think these tools were made for teens. I think your adults were really cool in 80s. Im sure some, were.

When the phone was connected to a cord, humans were free.

Takes him a long time to get to it.

HE SIGEND A H*ENTAI! I am SO SORRY FOR HIM!

great talk. I didn´t know what was a blue box back in my days, its much clearer now haha

His description of blue boxing (in the DTMF section) is incorrect. The DTMF tones we have are not the same as the multifrequency tones, called MF, used to dial trunks. Also, many phreaks would "rotary dial" trunks with nothing but a Capt Crunch whistle or there own mouth.

Regarding calls to/from Dallas & Ft Worth being higher than calls to NY, it had a lot to do with intrastate charges being added to in-state calls that were not added to out-of-state calls.

You should have published the tutorial in the 80ies, not wait until now

2600 Hz falls within normal human voice range.

David, the ABCD keys were not on the operator's console, only on DTMF phones.

Operators had break (2600Hz), KP (1700Hz), KP2 and so on.

Of course none if it works with SS7.

OBTAINING TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICES BY FRAUD... back in the day when I was young

Ess area?

It wasn't John who figured out the 2600 crunch whistle .. it was one of the blind kids who hung out with us. Would you like the isolator circuitry that never got caught? I was 17 (1970) and didn't go to jail either (minor files sealed to all but government agencies) . I memorized the ESS manual before we did anything .. we made a lot of money selling telephones with a slight modification .. I think I'm safe talking about it now since it's been so long (and I have one foot in the grave) .. It's part of the story that is not in the public .. I just miss the fun and I think John got screwed because they wanted to punish someone. I was forbidden to even ever talk to him again. I got my job as an adult in some ways because of the activity. In the interview they were intrigued (they had no problem seeing a file that was supposed to be sealed). . I worked there for 26 years traveling the world for the feds .. John got screwed and I benefited from it, I always felt bad about it. Have you talked to John at all? How is he doing if you have? (even after all this time still afraid to talk to him)

Guess I should have kept my Mac SE, from the 80’s. 🤷🏼‍♂️

That “complete” set of Gameboy games didn’t look anywhere near complete. You’re telling me that was over 1000 games?

could u hit the return coin button on the payphone after u red box it?? free money hack?

This is phreaking awesome!

“A pornographic anime magazine”
Because he doesn’t know what it’s called 😅

OMG! HOLY GRAIL!!!

Thank goodness I was not born during this era because I would definitely get arrested for doing this.