Looks like you're a new visitor to phonelosers.org! Or maybe you just haven't been here in awhile. In any case, welcome to the site! There's lots of things to read, watch and listen to here. The Phone Losers of America have been around for a really long time now (just read the history if you don't believe me) Below is a list of things that you'll probably enjoy here.
The Adventures of Dino Allsman and his Cordless Phone: A man named Dino was innocently threatening his wife on his cordless phone one night, completely unaware that some weirdo a block away was listening to his phone calls on a police scanner. This is the story of what happened to Dino throughout the rest of that night.
Remotely Hijacking a Store's Overhead Paging System: In 1995 we discovered a small security hole in the phone system of our local Fred Meyer store. It allowed us to call into the store and broadcast whatever we wanted to on the overhead paging system for hours at a time. And there seemed to be nothing they could do about it.
Drive-thru Shenanigans: We trick dozens of fast food customers into singing songs and telling jokes by taping a sign onto drive-thru speakers, promising them a free meal for their efforts. Here's a collection of some of the better jokes and songs.
Pizza Pranks: Our job at a pizza delivery shop didn't last very long since we call customers nazis, refuse to put meat products on their pizza because we're vegetarians, and come clean about our roach problems. Here's a recording of those calls.
Wal-Mart Pranks: Not only does our Wal-Mart page show you how to have fun in a Wal-Mart at the expense of other customers an employees, but it also features some recordings of call from customers from when we picked up the outside lines in the stores.
Hotel Pranks: Whenever we call up a hotel and connect ourselves to a random room and then claim to be the front desk guy, a peculiar thing happens - the guest who answers the phone almost always believes us. We can say just about anything we want and they’ll still think we’re the front desk workers. Especially when we’re calling late at night and waking them from their sleep. Don’t believe me? Just take a listen to these calls...
Recording Telephone Calls: There are a lot of different reasons you might want to record your phone calls. Whether you want to record your hilarious prank phone calls or you just want to keep a record of your calls, this is the page that will teach you how to do it. We'll cover the laws on recording calls, the equipment you need, and even how to tell if your own phone is tapped. We'll even give you some ideas on recording your calls from pay phones or your cell phone.
Identifying Phone NUmbers: Every so often you have a phone number and you want to know who it belongs to. Maybe it keeps showing up on your caller ID and you want to know why. Maybe it's showing up on your spouses phone bill. You run it through a bunch of free internet reverse-search directories and search engines but nothing will pull up any current information on them. Most people just give up, but you don't have to. This article will give you a few more ideas on getting information from an unlisted phone number. It will also give you ideas on keeping your own number a little more anonymous.
PLA Radio: All the stuff from the PLA that you know and love is now in podcast form. Listen to songs, skits, commercials, parodies, prank calls, stories and more.
PLA Forums: Once you're done reading about all these insane pranks, you'll probably want to drop by the forums to pay your respects to the people that have made it all possible.
That should keep you busy for now. But don't quit once you've finished all of that. There is much more on this site to keep you busy if you keep looking. Enjoy your stay!
Voice Conference and IRC Chat in Progress!
Every night from around 8:00pm EST (5:00pm PST) there is a voice conference happening on the PLA Voice Bridge. And guess what? That time is RIGHT NOW! So dial 218-339-8070 and join in immediately! If there's nobody on, just enjoy the silence for a few minutes and wait for someone to appear. If you're too poor to call the bridge, you can call 1-800-GOOG-411 and ask it to connect you to Max Wellhouse on Sir Barton Way in Lexington, Kentucky. This will magically connect you to the bridge.
The conferences are scheduled to last 4 hours each evening. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. And although the scheduled time is from 8pm EST to 12am EST, the bridge is open 24 hours a day if you ever want to stop in and see who's on. For more information on the bridge, click here. You can also discuss the voice bridge in the forums. If the PLA Bridge sucks too much for you, try calling the alternate PLA bridge number at (218) 339-8064. (Passes DTMF tones!)
While you're at it, visit us on IRC in #phonelosers. You'll have the best luck finding other PLAers on either Freedom-Uplink or on Efnet. The best servers to use are...
You can usually find a few people on either of those servers at any time of the day. So come and idle with us! You can connect to EFnet through our forums by clicking here. (This message will disappear after midnight and reappear again tomorrow at 8pm.)
If you were at Defcon this past weekend, then you may have noticed PLA paraphernalia laying around on a few tables. We gave away lots of free PLA Media DVDs, t-shirts, buttons, stickers and business cards. If you were the lucky recipient of any of these items, then congratulations! Lots of thanks to the vendors who traded me their t-shirts for PLA t-shirts. And thanks to our sponsors in the sidebars and all of you who’ve purchased PLA merchandise in the past. It’s because of you that I can continue to give away so much free PLA junk.
A couple years ago, murd0c showed me a flash game called Desktop Tower Defense. Since then, my productivity with everything has decreased by about 75% or so. Work, fun, PLA Radio, everything. I’m no longer content to just waste my own life away with this game, though. No, I want to ruin yours as well. Go start playing Desktop Tower Defense today, and add your score to the PLA Scoreboard. Beat my scores so I’ll have a new goal to work towards and my life will have meaning again.
Or you could do me a huge favor by hacking handdrawngames.com and ridding the world of that game forever. If you do that, more PLA Radios will come out. I promise!
This episode of PLA Radio covers a few updates, a crazy Craigslist prank, voicemails set to the love theme in Flashdance, and answering machine and voicemail hacking.
The PLA panel happened, but I don’t have too much information at this time. murd0c called me last night and gave me details, but I was too tired to remember anything he said. I’m pretty sure nobody died, though. Below is the video that was played at the beginning of the panel, which murd0c claims got a few laughs…
I’ll update this post as people send me links and information. Or if you just can’t wait for me to do it, then post your links and information in the comments. A huge thanks to murd0c, RTF, I-ball, Sidepocket and whoever else participated in it.
Here is a video of the panel, reduced to 10 minutes for YouTube. Thanks, Jammie, for videotaping this!
HOPE is happening this weekend and the PLA panel is happening this Saturday at 11:00pm. If you’re going to be a HOPE, you are not allowed to miss the PLA Panel. murd0c, RTF, I-ball and Sidepocket are counting on you to be there for an hour of PLA silliness. So BE THERE!#@!!@1!!#&^@#%
Dear RBCP,
I read your article on how to modify a CB radio to broadcast on drive-thru frequencies today. It was a great article, and a good YouTube video as well. I liked it so much, I stopped by my local RadioShack after work. I asked the employee to direct me to the CB radios. He showed me the TRC-241. I said to him "I see the screen is digital; but is the CB radio fully digital?"
He went off to look up the specs. Meanwhile I pulled up phonelosers.org on my cellphone. I saw the model number you wrote down was an earlier version of what I was looking at. I interrupted the guy, saying "Never mind, the model you have looks fine. I'll take it." He responds "Is there anything else I can get you?" - "No, not unless you sell toasters." Perplexed his really cute female co-worker looked over, smiled, and asked me "What are you going to do with that?" I replied "Well see, toasters have a crystal that operates on a higher frequency, which will help me test a theory." Grining, I paid the man, gave a very flirtatious good-bye to the girl and went to Target.
I found their cheapest model for about 7 bucks. I was so excited to get some pranks going tonight, I couldn’t stand it. I kept fantasizing about how I was going to have a lot of fun, and maybe impress some friends.
I got home and set down the two items on my desk. I thought to myself "Hey, I'll film this as proof it can be done!" I set up my camera, hit record, and began to take apart the toaster. I was trying to be as entertaining as possible, all the while, sounding as educated about what I was doing (much like you were). I took off the knob and slider handle. Then I took off the bottom of the toaster; then the side. I saw a tiny circuit board, resting on the bottom of a support plate - mocking me. "Wait a second!?" I thought. "There should be a crystal soldered onto this board! RB said *all* toasters have these as a safety measure!"
I then took apart the CB radio and looked for the crystal there as well, only to find nothing. “What the fuck? 0 for 2, and I'm out $100+!” Surely I bought the wrong model, or sported for a toaster that was too cheap. I thought the comment section of your post would be a good start. Anyone that has run into trouble with this would have posted a solution, or their concern.
I was right. Someone said that the post was made near April 1st. I checked the YouTube page of the video, and plenty of people were shouting "this is so fake! you people are idiots!," etc. I knew right then, I have just been had. I started laughing to myself. I couldn’t believe that I wouldn't have second-guessed such a simple tutorial from you, the mighty trickster. I went back to the RadioShack and saw that the people I dealt with, had already gone home. I explained to the other guy that I was a victim of an elaborate joke, and how I took apart a toaster in order to get to a high-frequency crystal. The guy looked at me like I was the biggest moron on the planet, while he shook his head. "No.. No. You’re not going to find a crystal like that in a toaster." He replied.
To say the least, he refunded me my money. *whew!*
Thanks, RBCP, for giving me the motivation to tear apart a toaster!
So…it’s been a few months now and I guess it’s as good of a time as any to state the semi-obvious…that article about modifying toasters and the accompanying YouTube video on the subject were hoaxes. There is no crystal inside a toaster to “control the frequency of the heating coils” and you can’t replace anything inside a CB radio to make it transmit on a drive-thru frequency. Sure, there are ways to hijack fast food frequencies, but using a CB radio and/or a toaster isn’t the way to go about it. Our goal was to destroy as many toasters on the planet as possible.
This turned out to be my most widespread hoax, thanks to Gizmodo, Consumerist, Fark and Digg linking to it. The video was watched over 100,000 times and I don’t know how many people visited the phonelosers.org article on the same subject. It was a lot, though. I received at least 50 emails about toasters and many threads were created on the PLA Forums by new users, begging for help on the subject. We deleted a lot of them, but here are some of the surviving threads…
Even better than the forum posts were the YouTube comments on this prank. You’ll notice that many of the first comments were positive reviews of the video, a lot of them claiming that they tried the mod and it worked beautifully. These were mostly made by people from the PLA Forums, just trying to make the video more realistic by backing up the claims that it worked. The rest of the posts fall into these three categories:
You asshole, your prank cost me money! You suck!
Haha, your prank cost me money! You rule!
I’m so smart that I realize this is a prank and I’m desperate to prove this to everyone.
I have a lot of emails that are pretty funny, but I’m too lazy to search through my archived email, looking for the best ones. Many thanks to all the people who helped with this prank by debunking the debunkers on YouTube and by stringing along the new users on the forums. And a huge thanks to Zan, who not only had an awesome sense of humor about the whole thing, but even sent in the picture of himself with a disassembled toaster. Go visit his iNFEKTiD website and pay your respects!
And to you people who were hoping to hijack drive-thru frequencies - shame on you! Messing with minimum wage employees is wrong and very un-Christian-like! People like you cost these businesses lots of money and you shouldn’t be thinking of doing things like this! Shame, shame shame!
HOPE is less than a month away, so it’s not too late to make arrangements and attend. There will be a PLA panel there, just as there was in 2006, which will be on Saturday at 11:00 pm. Location: Turing, on the 18th floor. Join murd0c, RTF, I-ball and Sidepocket for an hour or so of PLA fun. And hopefully you’ll get one of the hundreds of PLA Media DVDs from the picture above. BE THERE!#@!!@1!!#&^@#%
In the spirit of unauthorized PLA Radio episodes, here’s a little unauthorized PLA TV made by Trevelyn, advertising the most recent episode of PLA Radio.
And speaking of PLA TV, YouTube’s Related Videos on Trevelyn’s video shows a bunch of EvilCal’s old videos that I haven’t seen in a few years, from when he posed as a reporter for phonelosers.org at an Iraq war protest. Watch those too!
And finally, there’s a new podcast out called Security Justice. It deals with all kinds of phone and hacker topics, including a little piece about voice authentication which was breaking news in PLA Radio Episode #17. Their show can be found at securityjustice.com.
For the past few days, members of the PLA Forums have been showing their sensitive side by writing beautiful bits of poetry on the Poetry Critical website. These inspiring words about cacti, telephones, motels, and hacking have been some of the highest rated poetry on Poetry Critical this week.
Of course, some people are jealous of the PLA’s amazing talent. People like the regulars at Poetry Critical, who hate that their own emoness is being overshadowed by our sheer brilliance. But we can’t let a little jealousy keep us down. We’ll keep writing from the heart and try to ignore their unending hatred for cacti and telephones. Be sure to visit Poetry Critical and look at some of the insightful works of art that are currently featured in both the newest poetry and the highest rated poetry. Be sure to rate our poetry with whatever you feel is fair. And it’s easy to set up your own account and begin writing your own poetry immediately if you’re into that kind of thing.
Also if you like to like to talk about cactus and poetry, their forums are full of interesting conversation. I’d like to say thanks to the Poetry Critical regulars who brought my newfound love for poetry to life by spamming my homepage this morning.
June 22nd, 2008 update: The hilarity which once ensued on that site has nearly been extinguished at this point. They have banned all poetry with references to cactus in it and they’ve been deleting our accounts. The forums still have a small bit of hilarity left in them, but threads are quickly locked or deleted now. They really brought the hammer down on the cactus.
linear here. you were expecting someone else? The United Phone Losers have hacked into the PLA mainframe gibson, and taken control of the beloved PLA Radio. Listen in as we give a brief UPL history lesson, hack rbcp’s voicemail, and mess with people on Craigslist.
OMG HAX.
Show Notes:
00:00 Mitch Hedberg
00:20 Intro
00:47 Brief UPL History
02:35 Call to Renita
03:10 Call to Bertha
04:25 Call to linear’s Mom
05:25 Call to American Airlines
06:58 Hacking Brad’s Voicemail Box (Music: Los Gatos Negros “We Shall Bring A Darkness”)
07:15 Voicemails - (505) 796-4020 or phonelosers.org on Skype
11:15 Free Kittens
12:35 Black Changing Table
13:33 Wild Animal Park Sting Operation
15:40 Sell Me That Fucking Ford part 1
16:51 Sell Me That Fucking Ford part 2
17:36 Sell Me That Fucking Ford part 3
19:10 Confidential Carpet Cleaning
20:57 visit http://www.phonelosers.net
21:02 Wham! “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”
Every night from around 8:00pm EST (5:00pm PST) there is a voice conference happening on the PLA Voice Bridge. And guess what? That time is RIGHT NOW! So dial 218-339-8070 and join in immediately! If there's nobody on, just enjoy the silence for a few minutes and wait for someone to appear. If you're too poor to call the bridge, you can call 1-800-GOOG-411 and ask it to connect you to Max Wellhouse on Sir Barton Way in Lexington, Kentucky. This will magically connect you to the bridge.
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This episode of PLA Radio covers a few updates, a crazy Craigslist prank, voicemails set to the love theme in Flashdance, and answering machine and voicemail hacking.
For the past few days, members of the 
GREETINGS FROM WITHIN THE PLA STUDIO.