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. If the bridge sucks, try the other lines.
Line #1: 218-339-8070
Line #2: 641-678-3404 Ext. 752
Line #3: 218-339-8055
Line #4: 781-222-0034 Ext. 752
Line #5: 413-351-4140
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.)
Throughout my years of hanging out on voice bridges, I’ve heard my share of prank calls to emergency services. I do my best to talk sense into these people and try to convince users on our forums that you shouldn’t do this, ever. You shouldn’t prank the cops, the fire department or 911. You shouldn’t make bomb threats, physical threats or hinted threats to anyone over the phone, because then the emergency services start getting involved and that’s bad for everyone.
So where is the line drawn? Is it okay to prank abuse hotlines? Suicide hotlines? Drug and alcohol hotlines? In my opinion, no. Leave all of these places alone. There are so many other people and businesses out there that you can prank, so why bother with any kind of hotline service?
But then there’s the Anger Management Hotline. Now that just sounds hilarious. A hotline set up for people who have anger issues. There can’t be anything too illegal about calling up some anger management people and giving them a little hell. They’re just asking to be pranked, right? Apparently not, as Carlito from Madhouse Radio recently found out.
Madhouse Radio is a fun prank call show to listen to. I’ve been a fan of it for quite some time now, and there’s always plenty of entertaining bits throughout the show to keep me listening. I was surprised to see one of the more recent show descriptions, though. It read, “Historic Madhouse show, Carlitos studio gets shut down by the police hence the short length and sudden cut off. An anger management line is not amused with Carlito and Hollywood.” Wow.
If you take a listen to the 12/18/2008 show you’ll hear Carlito’s call at about 14 minutes, 55 seconds. He calls the lady on the other end a motherfucker, a piece of trash and a stupid bitch and she somehow considers his call threatening enough to send the police to his house and he’s arrested.
On the Madhouse forums, Carlito says, “I did some calls to an anger management line on Thursday night’s show. The woman considered it ‘Violent Calls’ which they weren’t and she reported us to the local PD here based on the SpoofCard caller ID (came up with my local 407 area code). During the show our phone line got intercepted and rerouted (HOW THAT IS LEGAL I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA) to the local 911 dispatch. Based on that they were able to get my address and immediately dispatched 2 units to the house in about 15 minutes. Apparently this Anger Management line/company has some kind of special ‘emergency line’ status and they can get shit done.”
You see that? He used SpoofCard and they were still able to do some magical rerouting wizardry with the phone lines and get his address within 15 minutes. And he didn’t even threaten the lady - he simply cursed at her as a part of his shtick of needing help with his anger issues. If you think pranking “crisis” hotlines (how is anger management even a crisis??) is funny, then this should tell you that it’s officially a horrible idea. Stick to spouting your nonsense at normal businesses and people.
Visit this thread on the Madhouse forums to read more of Carlito’s story, about how they confiscated his computers, ranksacked his studios breaking furniture in the process, and spent a night in jail. Thankfully he was let go the next day, all the charges were dropped and his stuff returned. So it’s a happy ending, but would you really want to go through all that just to make a funny call to a hotline number?
Next time someone on the bridge says, “LOL, let’s prank the suicide hotline!!!” point them to this article and tell them to shut the hell up.
During last summer’s HOPE conference, WhiteSword took a PLA sticker-covered cactus all over the con and forced people to take pictures with it. The 2 pictures of Emmanuel Goldstein looking annoyed next to the cactus make browsing the 70+ pictures completely worth it.
For the past 2 years, the PLA’s videos have been stored in RBCP’s YouTube account, mixed in with his boring videos about Legos, kids, rubix cubes, gadget addiction, nature and Mormon torture. But now you can finally watch great PLA videos without all RBCP’s annoying personal crap by subscribing to the brand newPhone Losers of America YouTube!
It’s located at www.youtube.com/phonelosersofamerica and will carry all of the PLA videos. Currently only a small portion of the PLA videos are on the new account, but the rest of them will turn up eventually. So be sure to unsubscribe from RBCP’s lame account and start watching this new one instead. You also might want to take a look at these YouTube accounts…
And if you want to see some of the greatest YouTube stuff ever, take a look at the YouTube thread on our forums.
A few other updates…
1.) Our Wal-Mart Black Friday video, which was based on PLA Radio Episode #21, has been featured on the main page of eBaum’s World for 2 weeks now! This has brought a lot of new visitors to the site - more than 45,000 per day at the beginning. Most importantly, this has proven that our new server can handle lots of traffic. Thanks, eBaum!
2.) PLA’s Voice Bridge has been experiencing some downtime this week. We assume this is due to the extreme weather conditions in Minnesota. I’m too lazy to look for alternate bridges right now, but if you visit the voice bridge forums or go to #phonelosers on efnet, you can probably get another number to call.
3.) phonelosers.net is experiencing some downtime this weekend as linear moves to a new server. Hopefully his site and forums will be back up by tomorrow.
4.) Richard Cardo put up a new video! Then he took it down after accidentally leaving the comments open on it and not enjoying the flood of comments from PLA forum members. Then he wrote RBCP a couple of angry messages. View this thread to read them.
5.) Post your favorite YouTube videos and/or channels in the comments. This is an order!
This episode covers the fine art of picking up store phones while you’re in a Wal-Mart so you can talk to customers who are calling in. The calls in this episode took place on Black Friday, when it was entirely too busy for employees to notice RBCP talking on the phones.
Something I forgot to mention in this episode is that it’s easy to locate Wal-Mart store phones by looking at the support poles up near the ceiling. Poles that have phones on them are wrapped with blue tape. Poles that have fire extinguishers on them are wrapped with red tape. And to get on the all-store page, you need to dial #96.
There’s a whole page on having fun with store phones located at www.phonelosers.com/article/storephones/. It covers fun things to do in stores and things to dial on all kinds of different store phones. And then there’s our Wal-Mart page, which has even more answered calls and other Wal-Marty funness.
I made a video version of this episode a few days after it was released. As of this writing, it’s been watched 10,000 times on YouTube and over 105,000 times on Ebaums. It’s also been linked from dozens of blogs and forums. Not bad for just a week. Thanks again, Black Friday shoppers!
If you’ve ended up here from the video, be sure to listen to the podcast too since it’s got more calls, longer calls, and explains things slightly better than on the video.
On February 6th, 2009, members from the PLA Forums will be converging on the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington D.C. to plan, scheme, impersonate, attack, pillage, impregnate, terrorize, etc. Incidentally, this is the very same hotel that Shmoocon will be held at on the very same weekend.
Attendees will include, but are not limited to, RTF, Trevelyn, Rogue Clown and RBCP. I’m trying to harass altalp and murd0c into attending, but they’re not caving in quite yet. murd0c is just afraid I’ll get him kicked out of the hotel and nearly arrested again like I did at Phreaknic. Some people can just never let go of a grudge. handl3r claims him and some others will be sneaking across the Canadian border to attend. And Sidepocket says he’ll probably make it too.
Everyone reading this should immediately call up their favorite airline and book tickets to D.C. to hang out with us all. It’ll be fun. It’s hard to get tickets to Shmoocon, but who cares. You can still go to room parties and other parts of the hotels without Shmoocon badges. We’ll all do plenty of stuff outside of Shmoocon too, so it’d still be worth taking a weekend vacation just to hang out with all your favorite PLA people.
If you want to discuss this event, here’s our official planning thread on the forums. The PLA/UPL Twitter will be updated throughout the weekend with the whereabouts of the PLA group. And if you haven’t noticed yet, I stuck a countdown timer over there in the left sidebar to make you feel bad about the impending con that you won’t be attending because you have to act all responsible and pay your rent instead of visiting us.
Thanks, Altalp, for the awesome PLA pumpkin picture!
As long as I’m doing an update here, I should mention a few things…
(1) Tickets for Shmoocon go on sale tomorrow (November 1st) at noon! Quite a few PLA people are planning on showing up there to wreak havoc, including RBCP, Trevelyn, Rogue Clown, Rob T. Firefly and others. Click here to see the PLA’s Shmoocon planning page.
I feel it’s my responsibility to remind all of you that it’s important to vote in these troubled times. Your vote can make a huge difference in the outcome of the election.
And the election I’m talking about, of course, is the 2008 Podcast Awards. PLA Radio was selected from more than 200,000 nominees to be one of the Top 10 runners in the comedy category on podcastawards.com. You have until November 6th to cast your vote for PLA Radio! This site allows you to vote every single day if you want to, so if you really love PLA Radio, then visit this site daily and vote for us.
So stop what you’re doing right now and go vote. Just visit podcastawards.com, check the PLA Radio circle in the Comedy category, and give them your real email address since they verify your email address to discourage cheating. Repeat these steps every single morning, as soon as you stumble out of bed.
While you’re there, you should take a look at some of the other shows, which are inferior to PLA Radio’s awesomeness, of course, but some of them are still a lot of fun to listen to. So what are you waiting for? GO VOTE! And thanks.
Back in the early days of computing, when we all still used TRS-80s to connect to Fark with our 150 baud modems, people released instructional “text files” on topics like anarchy and whistling red box tones and hacking your Victrola record player. Of course, this is how PLA got its official start, but we quickly got out of it in 1997 when we saw the bright future of podcasting and blogging.
Linear, however, wasn’t so fortunate. He’s still stuck in an era where he thinks that text files are relevant and people still read them. I attribute this problem to all the pot linear smokes, and the VW microbus that he still drives. Yesterday he went and released a new issue of the United Phone Losers zine. To keep from hurting his feelings, I think we owe it to him to go over to phonelosers.net and take a look at his equivelant of blog posts written on stone tablets.
I don’t know what’s wrong with them either. It’s sad. I’ll figure it all out tonight, though, hopefully. Until then, you should visit the UPL Forums. They aren’t nearly as cool as the PLA Forums, but at least that’ll give you something to do until ours are back. Maybe we could fuck with all the users there or create fake accounts and post spam everywhere.
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. If the bridge sucks, try the other lines.
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This episode covers the fine art of picking up store phones while you’re in a Wal-Mart so you can talk to customers who are calling in. The calls in this episode took place on Black Friday, when it was entirely too busy for employees to notice RBCP talking on the phones.
I feel it’s my responsibility to remind all of you that it’s important to vote in these troubled times. Your vote can make a huge difference in the outcome of the election.
In this episode of PLA Radio we change things up a bit by doing something positive for the people. Praise Jesus!