Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!sumax!amc-gw!nwnexus!pilchuck!dataio!aez
From: aez@Data-IO.COM (Adam Zilinskas)
Newsgroups: sci.electronics
Subject: Re: free calls?
Message-ID: <2629@dataio.Data-IO.COM>
Date: 10 Aug 90 16:16:34 GMT
References: <26438@usc.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: Data I/O Corporation; Redmond, WA
Lines: 54

In article <26438@usc.edu> robiner@oberon.usc.edu writes:
>In article <1990Aug6.124516.8051@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> sheasby@dgp.toronto.edu (Michael C. Sheasby) writes:
>>
>>The other day I was in a mall and noticed a few yahoos gathered
>>around a pay phone... they looked around for cops and then
>>unscrewed the receiver on the phone (the ear end, not the mouth
>>end).
>>
>>They took out the small speaker and touched the two wires
>>leading to it to the handset holder (the thing you put the
>>phone back on when you finish the call). Then they dialed
>>and quickly screwed the receiver cap back on. Apparently this
>>saved them a quarter.
>
>Well, now the phone companies are really gonna love this net...
>
>Matthew Broderick pulled this scam in the movie "War Games" but I don't 
>know if it works in the real world.  MOst pay phones have glued, or locked,
>or sealed mouth peices anyway, so it'd be very difficult (and illegal)
>to try tampering with them.
>
>=steve=

I remember that the old pay phone system used to use bells to detect 
the coins going through the slot. A quarter would fall down one path
and ring one bell and a dime go down another and ring a different
bell (or was it dinging a bell several times?).
  Well some people found out how this worked and got some chimes that
matched the pay phone bells very closely. So when the operator said:
"Deposit 50 cents please" they would ding the chime X times and fool the 
system.  The newer phone systems now use a series of pulsed tones to
defeat this 'feature'.
  I also heard another legend that Captain Crunch Cereal one time had a toy
whistle in it that approximated the operator control tones used in the 
touch-tone system (the tones created by the illegal 'blue boxes' to
get free service from the phone system by enaging the switching systems
in strange ways). Well, I think somebody in ATT got lots of free 
cereal when they had to confiscate the whistles :-)
				Adam Zilinskas
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