The 'pay phone bandit' who baffled the FBI in the '80s | Hacker News Reader

The 'pay phone bandit' who baffled the FBI in the '80s

mentalfloss.com

180 pointsgmays62 comments

I love these stories to be shared here on HN. There was one also submitted some time ago about a cyclist who wouldn't make it into the olympics (or something like that) and started to rob banks and used his cyclist skills to escape. If I recalled correctly this was in the 80' or 90' and he used to give away the stolen money. Shame I don't have link.

One of the best uses of Perplexity.ai! Pasted your text

https://www.bicycling.com/news/a26081001/cyclist-turned-bank...

You can just Google for “cyclist who robbed banks”, AI isn’t really necessary for this.

You can just use Gopher, you don’t need Google for this.

I’m being flippant, obviously but my point is that every now and then a new technology comes along that supplants and older one because it offers a meaningful improvement over the last. AI search vs traditional web search is definitely one of those.

It's just as easy or easier to google "cyclist who robbed banks."

You’re not thinking through the whole experience. The search itself is just as easy, sure. You can type the same query into both systems. The difference is in the results. Traditional web search will then return a set of links which may or may not answer you query, it’s up you you to parse them and figure out if they have the content you need or if you need to rephrase your query and try again. AI on the other hand will parse the results for you and return the answer to your prompt directly. That’s a meaningful improvement.

If it is not 100% based in reality then no, it isn't.

> AI on the other hand will parse the results for you and return the answer to your prompt directly.

Yep! And that's going to save you _one whole step_ when you're posting meaningless follow ups in forums filled with technical users who would have had no problem getting the information themselves.

> That’s a meaningful improvement.

It's a marginal improvement to the least meaningful activity that occurs on a daily basis. So, it's totally worth the trillions that have been invested in it. :|

Even if that's true, the example definitely isn't proof of that given that the old technology seems to handle the problem just fine.

If they each give the correct answer in the same number of steps then there’s no reason to prefer one over the other.

My multiple experiences with ChatGPT hallucination, even at minimum temperature, leaves me preferring a web search answer. Just last week, jq hallucinated three different jq syntaxes that failed to parse.

That being said, I had been using web search for several years looking for the Get Smart episode I had seen as a kid in the 1980s where the enemy agent explains that he can't give up his suicide ring because "That's how it works, if I take it off, my wife will kill me." Google Bard found the episode on the first try.

So, I tend to fall back to LLMs only when search engines fail me.

Mental inertia is the phrase I use for preferring the one you learned first

Power usage, latency, ethical concerns.

Which is not the case here -- just simply "googling" would provide the right answer.

which is exactly what Perplexity did. I am saying this out loud because it'll be a few years before people wrap their mind around the circus over there. not because its awesome.

1) pay google scraper api (~1000 searches/$1)

2) run the crappiest llm people won't notice is crap

3) vc dollars

4) buy users by any means necessary

5) rope some earnest people into $40/month

rinse, lather, repeat

Hilarious career path: social work > Catholic priesthood > underwater welding > robbing banks

That story seems to be a brief summary, which points to a fuller article here: https://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/February-2019/Bi...

Found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29037860 (excellent article).

People might not like the AI plug, but personally this is the one use-case I find AI the most helpful to me. The ability to query general knowledge, with natural language, often not knowing what the hell I'm talking about. And the results don't have advertisements, which I also really appreciate.

I remember this story being released by Epic Magazine and Chicago Magazine.

The Bicycle Thief: https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/february-2019/bi...

On a sidenote: Epic Magazine is a treasure trove of these strange, little, Coen-brothers-movie-like stories: https://epicmagazine.com/

Here's the America's Most Wanted segment about the guy, James Clark, from 1988:

https://youtu.be/e56gA8NBXuQ?t=1204

The details about this guy at the end were hilarious. Apparently he always stays at Motel 6 and eats at 7-11. Totally living it up on Ma Bell’s dime, I see!

Ma Bell's _quarters_, you mean. :)

Only for the kids. Where do you think "dropping a dime on someone" came from?

I vaguely recall visiting Boston c1990 and discovering pay phone calls there were still 10¢, while they had been 25¢ in Indiana as long as I could remember. I'd be curious when and where the last ten-cent phone call was made.

Chat GPT says Emerson Nebraska had one until 2015. But I cannot find any source to back this up.

Reliable sources seem to say around 1985/1986 prices increased.

I feel like if that’s true, 2600 must have a photo, right?

I'm pretty sure I remember being thoroughly offended about 1980 when I found a pay phone that required 25 cents. I think that this was in the Denver area.

This thread is comforting to me* because by the time I became aware of the cost of using a payphone, they had already gone up to 35¢.

*in the opposite way to how those memes where they say "It's been 30 years since _____" kill me inside

Shame about the sound quality

Seems like the hardest part would be getting rid of all the coins. I'm not surprised he got caught, given two appearances on America's Most Wanted, and his tendency to pay for hotel rooms with rolls of quarters.

As another comment noted, perhaps he should have opened a laundromat or video arcade to launder the stolen money.

Should have taken them to a bank, converted to cash and then done what you said.

Sometime in the 80s we happened across a payphone that was spitting out quarters from the change return, partially jamming the return door in the process. Until then I always assumed that change was held in some kind of side compartment so the same coins inserted could be returned but either someone went crazy jamming it up with quarters earlier or there was a way for the payphone to make change.

Wonder if the guy ever thought about running a video arcade or laundromat. It would have been a great way to cover up his source of so many quarters and convert some of them into paper currency in the process.

Maybe someone put gum/something to block return coins. Then as people used the machine, the return coins built up. Usually the thief would return days later and remove the gum, along with the coins behind it.

Based on what others have said about how the coin mechanism works, this seems like the most likely explanation. Now it has me wondering if it was my brother who set it up. The payphone was outside a bar in an area I'd never been to before and I can't remember why we ended up there that day. Perhaps he was jamming up phones and then returning later to collect to proceeds. He was always getting into such small time schemes before he got mostly straightened out in the military.

I'd read a story a while back about a phone company employee who serviced payphones. He would periodically shut off power to payphones on his route, causing them to trap whatever coins the callers would insert. He'd return at a later time, turning the power back on. The coin return would then empty and he'd get the coins.

> He would periodically shut off power to payphones on his route

Pay phones do not require an external source of power to operate the line or the internal phone mechanisms.

> causing them to trap whatever coins the callers would insert

It's been a while, but my recollection is that if the coin relay loses power it should return the coins to the user immediately. This is why the Green Box and shorting diodes would work.

> He'd return at a later time, turning the power back on. The coin return would then empty and he'd get the coins.

It's interesting how people will try to turn stories of petty theft into clever achievements.

> that change was held in some kind of side compartment so the same coins inserted could be returned

That's exactly how it works.

> or there was a way for the payphone to make change.

It was controlled by a relay. If the CO pulled the relay to bill the call, the coins would divert into storage, otherwise the coins would fall into the return. If the signal was weak or was intentionally blocked then the coins would always fall into the return. It's possible that users just didn't notice the coins falling into the wrong slot.

See the History section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_box_(phreaking)

Was expecting more phreaking from this story

I don't think you could get cash from a payphone by phreaking, back in the day. At most you could get back the coins you put in. After each call, the coins dropped into the lock box. Phreaking was more about sending tones to the CO.

of course not, phreaking/boxing etc was about avoiding the cash altogether! Just a note that seeing a title about pay phone antics I expected/hoped for more of a hacking angle. Good throwback story nonetheless!

> Though it’s hard to imagine today, there was once a time when making a telephone call meant going home, asking to use someone’s phone, or plunking a quarter into a freestanding pay phone

Pfffft, what about the classic: "You have a collect call from PICKMEUPATBILL'S" ?

ah yes, passed around countless txtfilez in the '90s...

http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CALLATT.... http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CCF.TXT

Can't forget about his uncle Bobwehadababy Itsaboy

The classic Geico commmercial:

https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs?si=imqYkQjwxpATH1VH

>By one estimate, he hit phones in 30 of them,

Wouldn't they know exactly how many states he did this in since he was the only one that knew how to do it?

Probably not all instances of non-violent coin (and coin box) theft were recorded or assigned to him. Some instances could have been theft by employees or the coin box was inadverdently not returned, or needed replacement but a replacement wasn't available.

Post AT&T breakup means the phone companies were less centralized and organized, presumably, than if this had happened in the 1970s.

I wonder why the method was to take the box rather than replacing it after emptying it. Would that have made the crime harder to detect?

Yeah it seems like the same heist but leaving a random handful of coins behind in the box would have been much more difficult to detect

On a related note, I remember in the 80s, coin fed parking meters in Berkeley were systematically cut off. I never knew if it was simple thievery, or some anarchy protest.

It was Cool Hand Luke

Also on HN today:

Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833960 , https://jcs.org/2024/05/29/x1usb#

Which lead me to see what else the author has written:

https://jcs.org/projects -> https://github.com/jcs/payphone

Payphone Project 'These are some notes from my project to install a working payphone in my home and configure it to make and receive calls through an Asterisk PBX.

Tinkering with payphones is a lot of fun! Some of the later designs were quite advanced - the ones I have can dial into the exchange with a modem to report detected faults, submit their earnings and even download the latest tariffs every night. This was all done on just the power from the phone line and with late 80s tech. The server software, that we're now trying to revive, has some kind of bespoke distributed database to sync between regional exchanges but also work independently of one another. []
And there are some many fun and stupid things you can do with them! We set up one at uni can tell you what's for lunch at the cafeteria, connect to a voice chat on Discord, print an LLM summary of your phone call on a receipt...

[] For anyone for whom the above sounds familiar, no, it's not a Nortel Millenium, although we do also have two of those. They were made by Iskra Terminals from Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) and had this functionality at least 10 years before Nortel and the rest. If anyone is particularly interested in payphone shenanigans, shoot me an email (in bio)

I love stories like this.

Just thinking of out with the old, it mentions there are only 100,000 payphones left in america from 2 million.

Is there any value in maintaining payphones or will they all ultimately go? I dunno, it seems of value for emergencies, say one gets into an accident late and night and your phone is damaged, a payphone was impretty much in walking distance, now not so much.

Same with copper landlines. My mom still uses an old school phone that doesn't need power. A bad storm hit a few years back and everyone was without power for three days, but my mom still had phone access, unlike the rest of us scrambling to charge our phones.

It was the most reliable communications network we made and to just let it go seems wrong.

In Australia they became free to use. Some of them have free wifi as well.

https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/payphones-free-for-calls...

Now I want to see how long it takes Lock Picking Lawyer. Someone mail him a pay phone with a bottle of booze in the coin box!

About two minutes.[1]

It's a disk detainer lock, which requires specialized tools, and it unlocks counterclockwise, which is unusual.

The tool: [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQxVG-Munqw

[2] https://www.sparrowslockpicks.com/products/sparrows-disc-pic...

Correction: that's the lock on the GTE clone of the Western Electric payphone. The actual Western Electric version used an unusual lever lock. The later variant, the 30C, is claimed to have never been picked.

That's a really good lock design. It's simple, robust, and immune to standard picking techniques.

But there is a vulnerability. The blocking wedge, which is only supposed to move along one axis, has some mechanical slop. See [2]. So it's possible to get some feedback on which levers are blocking bolt movement. It's still a huge pain to pick.

[1] https://www.mattblaze.org/photos/misc/wecolock/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXLhCvUgDYQ

Inspiration for Bruce Sterling's short 'Jim & Irene!'

Why didn't he replace the coin box with a previously obtained, now empty, coin box? Then they'd never really know if they'd been hit... much harder to tell.

They know how much money “should” be in the boxes based on phone system records.

Ah, good point. Hehe.

Not condoning his actions, but "a thinker and doer" is certainly a fitting eulogy, and not a bad one to have in ones grave.

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