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Bad as Shit

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143 pointsrglover24 comments

I had a similar situation when I was 14 years old making prank phone calls. It was 26 years ago and I stumbled on a block of numbers that contained every phone company error message. You know... You have to dial 1, Don't dial a 1, deposit a quarter, etc. Most of those numbers work to this day - 215-257-0012 to 215-257-0017.

The best trick I ever did with them was to record the message, "We're sorry, you must first a dial a 1 to call this number" message onto my answering machine when I was 21. People would call me, get my answering machine that told them to a dial a 1, hang up then dial a 1 and then get the real phone company error message, "We're sorry, it is not necessary to dial a 1 when calling this number." I didn't get a single message for two weeks since people were basically caught in an infinite loop.

I thought it was pretty funny until I came home from work one day and the phone company was digging holes around my house. Apparently my mother reported a problem on my line to the phone company who couldn't figure out how the hell my line got mixed up like that so they just started digging.

Back when the registrar at Penn State could be accessed either directly (standing in line), or via phone dial-in, my roommate and I recorded the registrar's welcome message as our answering machine message. His mom was not amused, but everyone else on campus who regularly called us enjoyed it.

I enjoyed scanning BellSouth's 780 oddball exchange (amongst others) as a kid. It was their exchange to provide services to customers as well as linemen. Sometimes you'd find a modem, sometimes an operator, sometimes an automated service like ringback or ANAC. Some of these numbers would allow you to control other lines or listen in, and abusing them resulted in jail time.

I would have a little black book with a number and what I found on the end of the line, with pages and pages filled with weird unknown uses. Here's a similar list of them compiled by someone else: http://www.angelfire.com/ga3/bigbossnms/exchange.html

Funny now that I look back on it; apparently they transitioned these to 1800 numbers. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0vLlaOY...

I remember reading this when I was a teenager. I'm embarrassed that I ever found it credible.

There's a category I have for this sort of thing, which I don't have a good word for. The stories from the Daily WTF also generally get slotted in here. It's "crazy stuff really does sometimes happen in the real world, but you'll never be able to verify this specific story either way".

Did this specific story happen? I'll never know. But there's equally crazy stories that have happened. Not necessarily a lot, but non-zero. Much moreso for the Daily WTF; every story is obviously not pristine, unvarnished truth, but I've seen dozens of people pile on to how impossible a particular story is when I've witnessed the moral equivalent in my own experience, so....

(Fortunately the truth value of this story doesn't matter.)

This category overlaps (possibly completely) with a similar category: stories that can't be told, but since you don't need the damaging-if-revealed details and won't pursue them, a sufficiently fictionalized account is released - it gets the "truthy" story across without putting anyone at risk. Favorite example is Richard Marcinko's Red Cell.

I think we can be pretty confident that nobody called "The President's Secret Bomb Shelter" from a pay phone, and nobody's uncle got in trouble for asking about a phone number.

Its a good way to check if your bullshit meter is working properly...

> It's "crazy stuff really does sometimes happen in the real world, but you'll never be able to verify this specific story either way".

Not necessarily..

804-840-0000 804-840-0001 804-840-0002

So it wasn't always impossible to confirm, just time consuming. Except now you would need a time machine to confirm this, since I'm sure they have changed the phone number since this story started making its rounds.

This seems made up to me. A bit too much like the movie Sneakers or something. Plus the resolution with the uncle being able to get the answer seemed too convenient. Is this a confirmed story?

Most likely made up, but that's the fun in the story. Doesn't need to be true to be good.

"Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story..."

Yeah, if he almost got fired for it, how was even able to find out? Were they like "Well, it's the President's bomb-shelter, but we were almost going to fire you for asking us about that!"

Who knows? I remember reading this story back when it originally published.

The fact he included the area code and exchange in the story lends a certain amount of credibility to his story as he was essentially inviting phreakers to have their own fun.

I have similarly-exhilarating stories that I won't go into. But they gave my teen-aged self a great deal of fun touching the fabled "cloak and dagger" world. So, it's believable to me. Back in those days, there wasn't such an emphasis on domestic COMSEC. Anyone remember romulus at a certain US IC agency?

I'd say the second half is probably false. I wouldn't doubt that somebody managed to find a weird number where the owners were evasive, but this sound a lot like "My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me there's a secret level if you can get Mario to jump into the sun".

If the number was such a big secret, how did his uncle, working at a random federal agency, find out what it is? Need to know should have kept it from the uncle, and goddamn common sense (and the threat of prosecution) should have prevented him from blabbing to his idiot phreaker nephew.

Edit: this guy watched too much X-Files as a kid. Replace the caller with Mulder and the uncle with A.D. Skinner, you've got something straight out of an episode.

There is a -1!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8GOytc32RE

If you like these kinds of stories, here is the ultimate classic: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5iZB7A31G4Ic1VNS05TN3Zxa0k/...

If you prefer not to use Google docs and just read the text, it's also part of the JRCB, so can be found here: http://www.textfiles.com/anarchy/JOLLYROGER/150.jrc

I remember being passed files from the cookbook on floppies at school, I thought it was the greatest sources of information at the time, along with the "Book of Forbidden Knowledge" that you used to be able to buy from ads in the back of magazines.

For some reason it reminded me of "The Electronic Money Mill". Original site is gone but The Internet Archive has a copy: http://web.archive.org/web/20080412233535/http://www.msen.co...

Fun (semi-fictional) read about Electronic Funds Transfer, crypto and the FBI.

As soon as the operator hung up without verifying the number I was expecting a "World War III phone" style punchline to this.

"However, if he dialed 804-840 and four rather predictable numbers, he got a ring!"

What are those predictable numbers? Is this a US thing? Thanks!

Super exciting article btw, what year is this from?

What are those predictable numbers? Is this a US thing? Thanks!

Probably '1600' for the street address of the White House.

(For those non-Americans the White House is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Washington, DC)

I remember reading this in the ACB many years ago. Thanks for digging this up.

Anarchist cookbook classic

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