Phone Losers of America

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I've always wondered how you "Hijack" business phone lines. As in, a customer calls you and you answer but they think it is a certain business.

The hijacking thing we used to do was pretty illegal and we haven’t done that in about 10 years now.  Just want to make that clear, that most of it all happened in the 1990’s, during my wreckless youth.

It was pretty easy really.  We would call up the phone company, pretending to be the business and we’d complain that our phone lines were all down and had been for more of the day.  The phone company would arrange to send out a technician to repair the lines. Then we’d say, “Well until the lines are fixed can you at least forward the calls to my cell phone?” and the phone company rep would say “Sure!” and they’d forward the calls for us.  

The “cell phone” would usually be PLA’s voice bridge, where we could sit on the line and answer the calls when they came in.  The very first hijacks I did like this were forwarded to pay phones.  Back in the late 90’s, I even forwarded an ISP’s tech support lines to my house and I sent one to a phone company test loop, before all those disappeared.  I’m much more law abiding these days and will never do a hijacking prank again.  They were fun while they lasted though.

The calls we do these days where customers think we’re an employee are usually being called back by us after we trick a business into giving us their customer’s phone number.  And then the Wal-Mart calls that I picked up a few years ago were actually me walking around several different Wal-Marts and just picking up the store phones whenever I heard a department paged.  And then we did a similar thing at Target.

Craig made a video for the PLA channel that makes him 38% more likely to get kicked in the balls the next time he sees Crystal. Thanks Craig!

How do you usually get people's number?
Anonymous

Why do you damned people always ask anonymously?  GAWD!  Oh, maybe it’s because I yell at everyone.  I should cut that out.

I assume you’re asking how I get the phone numbers of customers to various businesses so that I can prank them.  It’s stupidly easy to do.  I call up the business that I want customer phone numbers for - let’s say it’s a large pizza chain - and I say, “OMG, hi!  I’m Roy from your corporate office.  I’m showing that you’re having WACKY computer problems because we’re not receiving any of your orders like we normally do.”  

After a bit of chatting I ask them to give me the phone number of their most recent customer so that I can see if it comes up on our computer.  They read it to me.  Then, completely forgetting that I said I would put it in the computer, I keep asking them for more numbers until they get irritated or suspicious or I just have too many numbers and am tired of listening to them.

This works for just about any company with a corporate office.  We started with the photo department of a well known pharmacy store, then moved on to a pizza place.  We did pizzas for so long that they caught on and started sending out corporate memos, but that didn’t matter because most employees still did it.  Large department stores, oil change stores, portrait studios, electronic stores and even various toll-free numbers for items advertised on television were all happy to give us personal information on their customers.

It’s really kind of scary and you should definitely assume that any information you give to any company can be easily tricked out of them by bored drunk people on the internet.  (Seriously, half the time we’re slurring our words and not being convincing at all and they still give us whatever we want.)

If you do this yourself, be careful what kind of information you get and where you get it from.  There are laws against getting information from pharmacies, banks and telephone companies, though it’d be just as easy to get it from those places as anywhere.

your awesome

No, YOU’RE awesome.  As in, learn proper grammar, goddammit.

This lady tries to tell me how to give lube jobs like she’s my manager or something.

Putting acetylene in customers tires is HILARIOUS!

And a hundred boyfriends silently cheered as the movie theater manager shut down Twilight and announced that they had to issue refunds because they were showing a pirated copy of the movie

I’ve been posting a lot of audio content on the phonelosers.org podcast feed lately.  If you’re not subscribed to it, then go to the site and start listening to the new stuff.

Oh, so now I can’t install a urinal in my own bedroom?  I’m sorry, I thought this was America.