💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › phreak › PHREAKING › phrkusa.txt captured on 2022-07-17 at 11:09:18.
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-12)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
"Phreakin' USA!" by John Fowler When you think "phone phreak," what kind of mental picture do you get? A teenager holding a sound-making box up to a phone? Or someone who uses false calling card numbers? The phone companies lose an estimated $80 million each year on fraudulent phone calls (compared to a total budget of over $27 billion!), but only a minute fraction is attributed to the above cases. So who is causing all these losses? A phreak is officially defined as "One who causes information to be passed over the phone without the phone company receiving due compensation." This applies to more cases than most people expect. For example, calling a "ring-back" system long distance just happens to be illegal, because you are passing information (that you want to use the modem line) without paying the phone company! This law is, of course, not enforcible, and even if it was, why take someone to court over a matter of twenty cents lost? It's also illegal to make a person-to-person call to yourself in order to let your spouse know you arrived at a destination safely! Likewise, calling someone collect at a pay phone, calling an operator to say you lost a dollar in a pay phone when you didn't, and completing a call with another person over "test lines" (test lines are in all exchanges, and if two people dial consecutive test lines, they may talk to each other without any charge) are all illegal! Spreading all this out along the entire phone network, it suddenly becomes a matter of millions of dollars lost each year, even without those little boxes that simulate operator tones! However, the common image of the phreak is someone who plays with red, black, and blue boxes to somehow gyp the phone company into allowing a free call. Each of these boxes, named after the color of the originals, has a different function, and many times the boxes are confused with each other. A red box is a device meant to be used only at pay phones. It simulates the sounds of various coins dropping into the phone. When some pay phones hear this sound, they automatically assume the a coin actually has dropped into the phone and registers it. A black box is a device which converts any phone jack it is hooked up to into a toll-free number. If Larry hooked up one, I and everyone else could call the CPTBBS as if it were an 800 number, yet Larry would not have to pay the excessive charges that an 800 number demands. With the sophisticated scanning equipment the phone company has today, however, black boxes can be detected after a while. The most infamous of the colored boxes is the blue box, which mimics the operator tones to allow free calls from any phone. They cost only $25-$50 to make, but can sell for up to $3000! Here's how it works: a phreak first dials a no-charge number, such as an 800 number for a large corporation (if he wants to add a little irony, he'll make it AT&T's 800-number!). The number rings once, and then the phreak generates a pure 2600-cycle tone. This tells the phone equipment that the call has dislodged and to be ready for the next call, though the phreak remains on-line! The phreak then gives another tone telling the equipment that a toll call is coming through (though in actuality it is not). The phreak dials the number and is connected, but the billing equipment never starts! When the phreak eventually hangs up, the records will only show that he made a toll-free call. It would cost the phone companies approximately one billion dollars to change the switching system so that the blue boxes would not work, so instead they decided to invest in a scanning system that records all questionable calls. Now that scanning system is so quick that it's almost suicide to use a black or blue box at home. Phreaks can still get away with using blue boxes at pay phones if the call is short, but that's about all. If someone is found using a blue or black box at home now, the box is immediately confiscated, and the phreak's service may be possibly disconnected. If someone offers to sell you one of these colored boxes for the standard ridiculous price, I'd advise against it. You stand to lose much more than you would gain in the long run. Reference: Kleinfield, Sonny; "The Biggest Company On Earth"; published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston; 1981; pp. 247-261.