Re: Phone scam...

It is/was called phone phreaking:
http://www.telephonetribute.com/phonephreaking.html

I recently had dinner with Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple) mentioned
on that page. He had some interesting stories to tell.

Edward Cheung, CARGBP2K ;-)

Robert. A. Bhooei wrote:
"Nwojedi" <nwojedi@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1149801589.438878.273360@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
even if it was possible, you'd need some killer technology to uplink
someones phone line. And stay connected, whether or not they were
using it. But i'm sure Beaver could build it, if it were possible :)



Standard land line phone technology hasn't changed a whole lot over the
years, back in the 80s/90s there were lots of little "boxes" hackers used to
build to maniuplate voltages, tones, etc to the point where you could
pretty much do anything you wanted. For example, one "box" worked on the
principal that when you pick up the phone when someone calls you, the
voltage drops on the line and the phone company knows to start billing you.
Well someone figured out how to keep the voltage from dropping so the phone
company would think your phone was just ringing and ringing and never start
billing the caller. The most famous was the "blue box" which was a modified
radio shack touchtone phone dialer, it changed the sound to the beeps you
hear when you put coins in a payphone... Thus you were able to make calls
from payphone for free just by playing a few tones. Really none of these
work anymore, and the phone co. heavily analyzes all activity on their lines
with special software looking for such things. Generally safe to say though
that your phone company will really never call you to "test a line".

.

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