Fun With Call Forwarding

[rbcp]

The following is a small part from the old version of the book that I doubt I'll end up using.  It's all true and shows a little of what could once be done with call forwarding.

   â€œWhat have you done with the phones?” my mother asked me as I walked in the door.  I’d been in school all day and I had no idea what she was talking about.  â€œThe phone company has been calling me all day, trying to figure out what you’ve done to your phone number.  They think your line is a pay phone.”

   I had my own private phone number in my room.  Normally my answering machine picked up my calls.  But sometimes I forwarded my number to random places, such as Dial-A-Story or the time and temperature number.  Recently I’d started forwarding my line to various phone company test numbers.  These were special phone numbers, set up by the phone company, that had all kinds of error recordings and other fun things on them.  

   The first one I’d ever called was the sweep tone.  A friend of mine gave this number to me years ago, telling me that it was a number to detect phone taps on your line.  This, of course, wasn’t true.  But it was still a cool number which made a bizarre noise.  Years after that, my friend Shonna introduced me to loops.  There were two phone company numbers that connected to each other, so one person called one line and another person called the other.  Then they could talk to each other.  Before I had my own phone line, I used these to talk to girls from school late at night.  Since most teenagers weren’t allowed to receive late-night phone calls, myself included, we’d arrange to call each other at predetermined times on the loop numbers.

   The sweep tone ended with the digits 9998.  And the loop numbers ended with 9991 and 9992.  Immediately after learning about the loops, I knew there must be a lot of other interesting things buried in that particular phone exchange.  So I called every number from 9900 to 9999 in that exchange and found dozens of interesting phone company recordings.  Most were various error recordings and one would play the really loud off-hook signal.  One number seemed to be a room monitor for the phone company switch.  I could hear machinery running inside and occasionally I would hear an employee in the room.  But my favorite was the number that said, “The call you have made requires a 25 cent deposit.  Please hang up, deposit 25 cents, and try your call again.”  Then it would hang up.

   This is what apparently had the phone company stumped all day; the simple act of using call forwarding to send my calls to the pay phone recording.  Some lady had called my phone number earlier in the day.  Hearing a recording which asked her to deposit 25 cents confused her, so she called Illinois Bell.  A technician checked her lines to determine that everything was okay.  Then she called my phone number for the technician.  According to my mother and the one Illinois Bell lady I talked to, this threw the phone company into complete turmoil for most of the day.

   As hard as they tried, they couldn’t understand how my line could possibly be causing that recording to come on.  They thought my line had somehow been turned into a pay phone line and they couldn’t understand why they weren’t able to switch it back into a regular line.  Since I wasn’t sure if I was even supposed to be calling that number in the first place, I lied to the lady at Illinois Bell and told her I just had the “Please deposit 25 cents” recording on my answering machine.  I promised her that I would change my message since it was causing so much confusion there.

   She said she would have the guy in charge of my case call me back the next day, but he never did.  He probably felt pretty foolish, spending so much time and energy on something that turned out to be an answering machine message.  My mother, who didn’t normally care too much for my telephone antics, actually found the whole incident to be really amusing.

   Throughout the years following this incident, I found call forwarding to be extremely useful and entertaining.  Not just for forwarding my own line, but for forwarding other peoples lines as well.  I first started doing this while attempting to wire myself large amounts of cash with Western Union.  I ordered call forwarding for a customer’s number, and then I would call that customer and talk them into dialing the codes that forwarded their phone line to a pay phone I was standing at.  Any calls that person received would go straight to my pay phone, so I was able to answer the verification calls from Western Union.

   The first time I put call forwarding to any kind of fun use was in 1993, while living in Indianapolis.  I worked in a movie theater and decided that it’d be lots of fun to screw with the customers that called into the movie announcement line.  Instead of the customers hearing a recording, they could talk to me.  But rather than get myself fired by answering the phone at the theater I worked at, I picked some other random movie theater to pull this prank on.  I settled on a theater several hundred miles away, in another state.  

   After ordering call forwarding for the theater’s line, I just had to call the manager and talk him into dialing the proper numbers.  I did this by impersonating a phone company repair technician.  I explained that we’d been having problems with their line and that I needed him to dial a number that would run a complete test on their number.  The manager was happy to help.  As soon as he dialed the number, the pay phone next to me rang.  I picked it up and informed the manager that the test was in progress and we’d call him back if there were any further problems.

   As the evening approached, I started receiving lots of calls from customers.  I spent the next several hours making up fictional movies titles and claiming to have sequels that didn’t exist yet.  I told some customers that the theater had been destroyed by a meteor the previous night.  I yelled at others for bothering me while I was trying to sell tickets.  And I shocked a lot of them with insane policies and prices on tickets.
“We’re the only movie theater in town, ma’am, so it’s not like you can go to the competitor.”

The call forwarding on this theater’s line lasted until late in the evening.  The theater employees had no idea that anything was amiss until angry customers started showing up at the theater, demanding to know which of their employees was so rude to them.  It took another hour after this for them to notice that their phone line was being picked up by someone else.  And then even longer for the phone company to understand how it was happening and to turn off the call forwarding.  I know all of this because I called this theater the next day, pretending to be with the phone company and asking the manager to tell me everything that had happened.

   At some point during my stay in Indianapolis, I discovered the phone company’s newest feature; which was called remote access call forwarding.  It worked just like regular call forwarding, but it allowed me to forward the lines on my own, instead of relying on the owner of a phone number to do it for me.  All it required was a 4 digit pin code.  And the phone company allowed me to pick the pin number myself, over the phone, as I was setting up the feature.  I would explain that I wanted the same pin number as on my calling card and they would be more than happy to accommodate me.  How could they possibly have expected something like this not to be abused?

   When you call a forwarded phone number, the original number rings a half-ring, then it forwards to whatever line it’s going to.  This is so that whoever is present at the original number will know that their calls are being forwarded somewhere.  At least, that’s the idea.  Most people didn’t know what to think when their phone would half-ring and nobody was ever there when they picked up.  Most Americans don’t use call forwarding.

   While working at the Lafayette Square Mall’s movie theater, I came up with a plan that seemed really interesting at the time, though I couldn’t get any of my coworkers to share my enthusiasm for it.  I had ordered remote access call forwarding for all of the businesses in the mall that were visible from the movie theater’s concession stand.  My plan was to initiate a chain of call forwarded numbers, causing every phone within earshot to do a half ring, one after the other.  I would forward the clothing store line to the pretzel place.  I forwarded the pretzel place to Orange Julius.  Orange Julius to the shoe store, and so on.  I would make a complete call forwarding circle which would perpetually half ring all of the phones on our side of the mall.

   It almost worked.  Making a complete chain of numbers just gave me a busy signal, so I had to break the chain by unforwarding the last number, meaning that each phone would only ring once but they wouldn’t continue ringing forever like I’d hoped.  When I called the first number, it worked just as I planned. Each number gave a half-ring until they reached the last one, who answered their phone.  I hung up and did it several times, instructing the employees at the theater to keep calling it while I stood at various places in the mall, listening for the ringing to happen at each store.

The problem was that most of the stores phones just weren’t very loud.  Not to mention that my hopes of creating the perpetual half ringing didn’t work at all.  If it had, I’d planned to forward every single number in the mall, making every store’s phone ring with just one phone call.  It’s too bad that the phone company wouldn’t let me forward pay phone lines.  I could have created quite a show with the large banks of pay phones at the Indianapolis airport.

[rbcp]

Part 2, since there's a limit to post sizes

There were two major theater chains in Indianapolis.  Act III and Lowes.  I worked for Act III.  My manager once told me a story about him and some employees writing LOWES SUCKS on the giant marquee next to a major highway.  They only did it so they could snap a quick picture of it, and then take it down.  It was this story that inspired me to play my own prank on Lowes, thinking my manager would find it just as hilarious as I did.  But man, was I wrong.

There were four Lowes theaters in Indianapolis and I’d ordered remote access call forwarding for all of them.  Then, I forwarded all of their recording lines to Mann’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, California.  Anyone trying to call the Lowes theaters for show times would end up hearing the times for Mann’s instead.  The recording clearly stated that it was the historic theater in Hollywood, sure to confuse any Lowes customers that called in to see what was playing in Indianapolis.

After the forwarding was working on all four theaters, I went up to his office and tossed a phone book onto his desk, opened to the page of theater listings. 

“Call Lowes!” I said with a smile.

“Why should I do that?” he replied slowly.

“Just call one of their numbers and see what you get!”

   He dialed the number, not sure what to expect.  His face shifted from curiosity to confusing and finally to complete horror.

   â€œHow did you change their greeting?” he asked me, obviously a little panicked. 

   When I explained to him that I didn’t change their greeting, I simply forwarded their phone lines across the country, he was horrified.  Above all things, he thought he was going to be charged for the long distance rates to California.  I assured him that Lowes was picking up the long distance tab for everyone who called the theater that night. 

He couldn’t believe what I’d done and he demanded that I fix it immediately.  He was worried that what I’d done would be traced back to their theater and he would end up getting fired for it.  No matter how much I assured him about it all, he just didn’t see the humor in what I’d done.  So I fixed it and he settled down.  But since I already had call forwarding set up on Lowes numbers, I sure had fun with them over the following weeks.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my managers concerns over the long distance charges being passed through the call forwarding wasn’t completely unwarranted.  A couple years later I began call forwarding numbers to 1-900 numbers so that I could dial a local number and be connected to a psychic or a phone sex line for free.  Or so we thought. 

It turned out that some of these numbers could actually see what number we were calling from, even when we were dialing through the forwarded number.  Most 1-900 lines would bill the number that we forwarded but occasionally one would manage to bill our number and the forwarded number at the same time.  This caused the 1-900 service to be paid twice for our call.  And it caused major confusion with the phone company.

I had a 1-900 block on my home phone, which prevented me from making calls to 1-900 numbers.  But since I was calling a local number to reach these 1-900 services, the block didn’t matter.  That is, until some of these 1-900 services began billing me for the calls.  Once again, call forwarding confused the hell out of the phone company, who couldn’t understand why 1-900 charges would show up on my bill when I had a 1-900 block on my line.  As far as they were concerned, this was impossible.

One morning an employee from Southwestern Bell called me up and he was stuttering the whole time because he was so confused about the charges and he didn’t seem to know exactly how to ask me what was going on.  I played dumb with him and claimed that I would never have a reason to call 1-900 numbers.  They agreed to remove the charges from my bill since I obviously had the 1-900 block on my line.  But they called me several times after that to question me further, though they never tried to accuse me of doing it myself.  They just didn’t understand how it could be happening and were hoping for some kind of an answer.

We just had to learn which 1-900 services would pass along our number and which ones wouldn’t.  We had a lot of fun bridging phone sex operators on the line and trying to get them to talk to each other.  We also used 3-way calling to give all of our friends free psychic readings.  It’s funny how those psychics never seemed to use their psychic powers to find out that we were committing phone fraud.  It’s when I found the number for BBS900, things started to really get out of control.

BBS900 was a service for owners of computer bulletin board systems who wanted to charge a membership fee to their users.  They would instruct their members to call a certain 1-900 number which would charge $25.00 onto the user’s phone bill.  This would pay for their access to the bulletin board service.  And each month, the owner of the bulletin board would receive a check from BBS900 for all the money he’d earned from the 1-900 charges.

I signed up for it as soon as I found it.  I ran a computer bulletin board, but I had no intentions of trying to charge my users a fee.  Instead, I was going to use call forwarding to make myself rich.  From each call to my 1-900 number, I would earn $20.00 of the $25.00 fee.  In the first month, I made four calls to it, just to test it out.  Slightly over a month later, I received a check for $80.00.

I took the check to the bank and cashed it, and asked for two rolls of quarters.  Throughout the week, I stopped by every pay phone I encountered, making several calls to a local phone number which forwarded to my 1-900 number.  I had eighty quarters on me and I used all of them to make eighty calls to my number.  It seemed like a foolproof way to make $1,600 in one day.  I planned to wait until I received my $1,600 check before pouring any more money into it, just to make sure it worked.  No reason to get greedy with it, right?

Once again, mass confusion ensued at the phone company and I never received my money.  A month later, I called BBS900 to ask why I hadn’t received my check yet and they told me that the phone company had been calling them all month, wanting to know how someone could possibly be calling their 1-900 from a bunch of pay phones.  From what the lady told me, the phone company had no clue at all how it could be happening.  Which put an abrupt end to my dreams of building a massive fortune from my very own 1-900 number.

Besides getting free phone sex and psychic calls, I used call forwarding to get free long distance too.  While working as a telemarketer at a portrait studio in Texas, I began forwarding their dozens of phone lines to out-of-state numbers that I commonly called.  Some were computer bulletin board systems and others were chat lines or 1-900 numbers.  But after quitting that job, the forwarding disappeared after a few weeks.  I could still forward numbers remotely, but that was a hassle, considering the amount of different phone calls I made each day.

It was around this time when I found out that I could forward a local number to AT&T’s calling card access number, which could then be used to make free calls using my calling cards and credit cards.  Which were cards that I’d either ordered for other people or that I took from my various jobs.  Since the calls were technically made from the forwarded line, I never ended up getting charged back for the fraudulent calls.  Instead, the business line that I forwarded would have to deal with it. 

I usually picked a secondary phone number at a business that never received calls, such as their credit card machine line.  The line would remain forwarded to AT&T’s calling card number usually for a few weeks, until the owner of the store noticed the extra charges on their bill and had it removed.  This worked great for about a year, until I was arrested for it.

Looking back, you’d think that something like this would be simple for the phone company to figure out.  A bunch of fraudulent calls turn up on a subscriber’s line right around the same time that someone mysteriously ordered call forwarding for them.  It’s obvious what’s going on, right?  But call forwarding never failed to perplex a phone company employee. 

While living in Albany, Oregon in 1996, a cop and a detective appeared at the door, demanding to search my room.  After having half of my room packed into the police car, I went to the police station to talk to the detective about the $10,000 in fraudulent calls that they’d traced to me.  I was cooperative with the detective and he was nice enough to tell me exactly how they tracked me down and how completely unhelpful the phone company was.

It turned out that a lot of the local people who were finding unauthorized charges on their credit cards for phone calls that they didn’t make were calling the police and filing reports about it.  The police started investigating the charges and everything seemed to point to the number that they thought the calls were coming from, which was a local business.  When diverting my calls through AT&T, they always had to ask which number I was calling from.  I gave them the same number every time, which turned out to be a local company.  I only picked the number because the last 4 digits spelled out my name.

  The police and the company launched an investigation into the employees that worked there.  After determining that none of the employees were responsible, the phone company suggested that somebody was probably hooking up a phone to the phone box outside of their business.  I imagined the police staking out the business for days, keeping an eye on the business’ phone box and hoping to catch the elusive phone fraudster.  They finally ruled out that possibility and came to the conclusion that they were dealing with a big-time computer hacker who was using a computer to hack into the phone company’s switches so that they couldn’t be traced.

The detective, determined to figure out who it was, resorted to calling every single phone number that was showing up on the credit card bills.  Mostly these were calls to a public party line for hackers called the Defcon Voice Bridge and a lot of computer bulletin board systems.  Which were all dead ends for the detective. 
Then he noticed a few calls to Target’s public relations office in Minnesota.  I worked at Target at the time and had called them several times.  So the detective called that number and asked the lady who had called them from the Albany area on a certain date.  Target was happy to give him my name and address.

I didn’t end up with any jail time, but I was fined $250.00 as a punishment for the estimated $10,000 in fraudulent phone calls I’d made.  And after it was all over, they returned all of my confiscated property.  That officially ended my credit card habit, my 1-900 calls, and most of my call forwarding experiments.

[Nod]

ITT: RBCP'S Memiors are awesome.

[Tachyon]

I'm inspired, but you left out how you got all those places set up with call forwarding with the phone company in the first place. Did you beigebox or what?