Legality of pranks.

[hello.jpg]

Rbcp everything phoneloserish is pretty damn awesome, from pla radio,  the soundclip archive, and storys about chris, dino, and big lar...and most people here have probably done there fair share of pranking.

I record most of my calls, some of them are pretty awesome but i am a little hesitant to put them online because i'm not sure exactly how legal it is, and how much trouble putting pranks online could get me into.

My question would be to those of you who have put content up, did anything negative come of it? and have you personaly caught any shit from having any of your content online arbie?

[Raptor]

the most illegal part of the prank is when you are actually CALLING them. When it's online, its just a nother lonely .mp3 on the internet. Well, as long as the person you pranked doesn't hunt down the site and sue because you used their voice without permission, but then again, wouldn't the hundreds of "drunken redneck" youtube video's be taken down?

[splynt0r]

Well I never got shit for any of the stuff I did. Except that one time when some dude got pissed cos I got my friends dog to shit in a phone booth. But thats it

[rbcp]

I almost always edit out identifying information from the sound clips to reduce the chances of people finding themselves on my site.  Dino Allsman found himself a few years ago and went to my parents house to yell at them.  He said he was going to sue me for wrecking his marriage.  Then some girl that used to be a telemarketer for Sprint found herself on my site and emailed me and told me she was going to sue me.  That never happened either.

Eastgate Cinema, the movie theater that murd0c and I hacked, somehow found themselves.  An assistant manager emailed me, asking for details about the call and asking me to fix the broken sound clip.  She seemed amused at the stupidity of her coworker and promised me she'd make a copy of the incident report that the theater had, which included printed pages of my website.  But she never sent me those.

People who've had their numbers posted on the web site have contacted me about getting prank calls and I've been threatened by them.  This one PLA kid emailed me once about how he was harassing a certain guy from the phone directory's loser list.  Then a week later, the mother of the guy he was harassing emailed me a bunch of threats about it.  I ended up befriending her and she gave me all kinds of details about how the calls are coming from a truck stop pay phone and she's been calling the truck stop employees and asking them to check the pay phone whenever they get pranked.  Then the prank caller emails me and tells me that they'd been beige boxing and were using that pay phone from blocks away.  That whole incident was pretty great.

[MattGSX]

If you're stupid enough to post someone's name/contact information/d0cs as well as pranks of them, and the person were to find it, they could contact your host/police/etc. Most people just threaten and never do anything about it, but Phonebomb got shut down for posting names and numbers, didn't they? The pranks themselves are illegal, depending on the state, since some states do have laws against recording phone calls.

As long as you aren't a dick, take names out of your pranks, and don't repost phone numbers/contact inf0s, you should be good, even if it isn't completely legal.

[rbcp]

Phonebomb got shut down because they were encouraging visitors to relentlessly harass the people they posted on their site.  I knew that site wouldn't last long.  I'm surprised that guy didn't get arrested.

[MattGSX]

That too.

But that's part of the reason that we don't post phone numbers here, right? Because people who have phone numbers posted tend to get pranked to shit, right?

[Tachyon]

The bit that makes me sketchy isn't being sued, I know there's no lawyer in hell (and there are doubtless plenty HAHAHAHA) who'd sue some dork on the internet who posted some prank calls. What worries me is the cops. What sort of penalty would there be, absolute worst case scenario, if I were caught?

[MattGSX]

Someone's name and phone number is public domain. Using their name without permission, I don't think, is something that can be punished criminally. What can be pursued is harassment, if your pranks are malicious enough. If you ALSO post their info online, you are encouraging others to prank them, and if enough people were to start pranking your victims off of the info you gave them, then you'd better believe you could be liable for harassment. Most likely, (if you have a webstie) it would get shut down. I haven't heard of anyone yet who has had criminal charges pressed against them, but as Arbie said, someone who runs a site like Phone Bomb could very easily be arrested for running a harassment factory like that.

[Tachyon]

I wasn't worried about that, it's the act of recording and putting calls online without consent. Here in Canada I'm told it's illegal but lots of things are illegal here that nobody cares about anyway.

[rbcp]

I think I could be charged for using the prankee's voice without their consent.  In TV and radio, you always have to get a person's consent to use their voice or image.  Then there's the law about getting a person's consent to record them on the telephone.  I've never gotten consent for any of these things.  If a person were to find their voice in my prank calls to them, they could probably file charges against me if they wanted to.  That is, if the statute of limitations hasn't expired yet.  I think they have to file charges within 5 years, though I'm not completely sure about that.  So probably half the stuff on my site is fine.  And I try to remove any identifying information from most of the calls to avoid situations like that.

But anyone could sue me if they really wanted to.  Anyone can sue you for just about anything if they have the time and the money to do it.  If I said mean things about them in a prank call, maybe they could sue me for defamation of character.  Or I guess they could sue just because I'm using their voice without permission.

Tachyon, is the person you're worried about in the same state as you?  Because if they're not, it seems like it'd be pretty hard for them to get the local police involved.  Because your local police isn't their local police.  They'd have to get the feds involved, and the feds aren't going to care too much about silly prank calls.  I read somewhere that they'll only get involved if the calls become threatening or if there's some kind of fraud involved.

I just guessing on all of this.  I know absolutely nothing about laws, except for what I've happened to read a little about.  Don't take any of my advice without checking the facts on your own.

[hello.jpg]

Thanks for the info guys, you pretty much cleared up everything i was wondering about.

[Tachyon]

I think I could be charged for using the prankee's voice without their consent.  In TV and radio, you always have to get a person's consent to use their voice or image.  Then there's the law about getting a person's consent to record them on the telephone.  I've never gotten consent for any of these things.  If a person were to find their voice in my prank calls to them, they could probably file charges against me if they wanted to.  That is, if the statute of limitations hasn't expired yet.  I think they have to file charges within 5 years, though I'm not completely sure about that.  So probably half the stuff on my site is fine.  And I try to remove any identifying information from most of the calls to avoid situations like that.

But anyone could sue me if they really wanted to.  Anyone can sue you for just about anything if they have the time and the money to do it.  If I said mean things about them in a prank call, maybe they could sue me for defamation of character.  Or I guess they could sue just because I'm using their voice without permission.

Tachyon, is the person you're worried about in the same state as you?  Because if they're not, it seems like it'd be pretty hard for them to get the local police involved.  Because your local police isn't their local police.  They'd have to get the feds involved, and the feds aren't going to care too much about silly prank calls.  I read somewhere that they'll only get involved if the calls become threatening or if there's some kind of fraud involved.

I just guessing on all of this.  I know absolutely nothing about laws, except for what I've happened to read a little about.  Don't take any of my advice without checking the facts on your own.

Most people I prank are in the same city/province as me but with the miracle of voIP I can prank globally. Figure it'd be safest to stick with pranking people in the States or somewhere far away where it'd be a hassle to get me?

[MattGSX]

if you were harassing/pranking overseas, you'd have to first be identified, and then (I think) the US would have to convince your country to press charges or they would have to find a way to extradite you, but I don't know how realistic that is. There's no way the US would waste that much time to try to extradite you for making prank phone calls. The FCC could put pressure on your service provider (assuming you're using a US-based company like Vonage or Skype) to suspend your account, but I don't think one person could prank enough by himself to give the FCC cause to put pressure on a phone company just to shut you down. Besides, it's not like you couldn't just set up a new account.

[ghostman]

I always understood this to be the reason why Arbie charged $4 while the TTT, (et.al) charged "normal price."  They really do hafta give the victims a cut / royalties.  KDK was selling CD's up until like 8 months ago, for $7, until he got called on it...

I've also understood that while you have the potential to be found guilty by your respective jurisdiction for harrassment, you're 'prolly okay on invasion of privacy.  The 4th amendment talks about "unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, ...particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The amendment only protects against searches and seizures conducted by the government though...

S'funny how a malicious prank call isn't as bad as calling someone on the 'no call' list... FTC says penalties up to $11K, per call!!  Yay!
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/rulemaking/tsr/tsrrulemaking/tsrfrn991124.pdf