During last week’s Phone Show, I asked listeners to leave notes on cars in their neighborhoods, claiming that they’d accidentally dented the car and to call me. Over the past week I’ve received about 10 calls from angry and/or confused car owners, asking what happened. You can listen to a few of their reactions to our crazy stories in the video below.

If you’d like to help us out with this prank, write a note and leave it on a random car with the 425-TWO FOUR THREE-7565 phone number. Don’t actually damage a car, though, as tempting as it may be.

What would you say to a person who called you, thinking you’d damaged their car? Leave your ideas in the comments below!

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A recent forum post motivated me to create a new torrent of everything PLA has ever done. Thanks to the nonstop Phone Show episodes, the torrent is now up to 15 gigs. You’ll also get every episode of the PLA Radio podcast, the Big Beef Bueno podcast, and thousands of prank calls, pictures and text. Download it right away and seed it for as long as you possibly can! And later this year when I try to sell a prank call album, be sure to laugh at me and remind me that I already gave it all away for free.

You might also be interested in the torrent I put up last year that contains every prank call album I have. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. Download my prank call torrent.

And speaking of prank calls, I’ve created a new page on phonelosers.org of the PLA’s prank calls. On this page you’ll find all the categories of prank calls available on phonelosers.org, with samples and links to each section. I tried to make the samples the best of each section, but you should let me know if you think something else belongs there instead of what I’ve put up. I’m too old to be making important decisions like this!

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Can you believe that after more than a decade of the internet existing, there’s still not a decent online guide detailing how to make prank calls? I’m going to attempt to rectify this serious problem by creating PLA’s first ever guide to prank calling. If you’re ready to delve into the amazing world of making prank phone calls, then spend just a few minutes reading this handy online guide so that even your first attempts at prank calling will seem somewhat professional and you might even avoid getting yourself arrested or killed.

Let’s get the boring “rules” out of the way first. All of my rules revolve trying to keep the authorities uninvolved in your prank calls, which is good for everyone. Involving the police in your pranks is not only a threat to your own freedom, but it also ties up emergency services. Even if you live in a small town that never has any crime, you still shouldn’t bother the police with your prank calls. Trust me, there are plenty of ways to have fun with prank calls that don’t involve the police. Follow these guidelines for a long, illustrious, jail-free career in prank calling…

• Don’t involve emergency services. This is rule #1 and should be common sense, because when you start involving emergency services, your local police are suddenly interested in your prank calls and you may find yourself getting fined or arrested. So as hilarious as you think it will be, don’t send the police or fire department to your victim’s house and don’t make silly prank calls to 911 or local police stations. Prank calls should be fun, not felonies!

• Don’t make threats. Why? Because making threats, even when you don’t mean it, is a crime. Threats scare people and then they call the police over a silly prank call, and suddenly you’re breaking Rule #1. Don’t threaten to kill anyone. Don’t threaten to slap anyone. Don’t threaten to blow up cars and houses. Don’t call Wal-Mart and attempt to convince employees of a Code Red or a Code Blue. (That’s Wal-Mart’s internal codes for bombs and fires.) Threats are bad and can result in your arrest.

• Don’t impersonate the police. You can’t pretend to be a police officer or an FBI agent over the phone. Not only is this illegal, but once your victim becomes suspicious of your call, they might call back the agency that you’re pretending to be with to confirm your identity and guess what? The police become involved in your pranks. The police don’t like it when ordinary citizens pretend to be them.

• Don’t call emergency hotlines. Suicide hotlines are off limits. Come on, do you really want to tie up the lines at a place that tries to keep people from killing themselves? Don’t mess with hotlines that are designed to help people. You’re not being original at all when you pretend that you want to kill yourself to a hotline worker. It’s been done a bazillion times before. Check out this article where Carlito from Madhouse Radio was arrested for prank calling an anger management hotline.

  

• Don’t cause damage. Some prank callers have shown us that people are gullible and will fall for absolutely anything if you sound authoritative enough. This tidbit of information is good to know and will aid you in making hilarious, epic prank calls. However, you should never exploit this fact to cause another person damage property or hurt people. PrankNet is known for causing people to pull fire alarms, set off sprinklers and break hotel windows. Members of PrankNet are also known for doing serious jail time for calls like these. Other prank callers have succeeded in making store employees cut wires on their computers with scissors or destroy items around them. One prank caller even convinced fast food managers to sexually assault his employees while he listened. Don’t do things like this! It’s fun to exploit the stupidity of humans, but you should stick to making them do things that are hilarious, rather than things that are harmful or destructive and things that will get you arrested.

• Avoid the police at all costs. Your prank call victims will often overreact and call the police even if you’re doing your best by not making threats and not involving the police. When you think this is a possibility with your victim, maybe it’s time to let them know that they’ve been pranked. Explain to them that you’re not really who you say you are and that you’re simply a prank caller who chose them at random and that their calls to the police will be pointless since you’re on the other side of the country. Apologize, laugh at them, and move on.

• Don’t steal personal data. It’s easy to trick people out of their personal information, but you should be careful when doing this because once the victim finds out that you’re not who you say you are, they might assume that you’re an identity thief. I know this is unlikely, but once you’ve talked them out of a bunch of information, your victim’s imagination will run wild and they could begin assuming the worst and end up calling the police to report a case of attempted identity theft. Talking someone out of their credit card numbers or other account numbers can get you into trouble, even if you didn’t write them down and had no intention of using them.

• Don’t prank locally. The easiest way to get yourself arrested for prank calling is to make calls in your own city. When you make local prank calls, it’s easy for your victim to call the local police and work with the local phone company to find out who called them. By sticking to far away places, you’re confounding the entire situation and making it nearly impossible for anyone to track you down. I don’t mean technologically impossible, but legally pointless. When you prank someone on the other side of the country, it’s no longer the simple act of calling the local police to show up at your house and talk to you. Suddenly your victim has to deal with multiple police departments and multiple phone companies and it’s just not worth the time or effort for anyone to deal with it. Unless you’re threatening people or doing any of the other horrible things mentioned in the rules above, it’s extremely unlikely that any authorities are going to help your victim since they know that they can’t drive 3,000 miles to arrest you. If you prank locally, especially from your own phone line, you are approximately a billion times more likely to have the police show up at your house.

• Only one call per victim. Don’t keep calling the same guy over and over and over, no matter how much he makes you laugh when he screams at you. When you keep calling the same person repeatedly, you’re suddenly harassing your victim instead of making a simple funny prank phone call to them. Try to keep it to a single prank phone call, maybe two, and then stop forever and move on to someone else. This will help keep the police completely uninterested in you.

One of the most important aspects of prank phone calls is keeping yourself somewhat anonymous. If your victim sees your name and phone number on their caller I.D. display, it’s going to be harder to convince them that you’re calling from a major company. And if your victim knows your phone number, then they’re obviously going to try and take some kind of action against you. Here are a few ideas on keeping your number hidden from the people you call.

• Dial *67 before you call anyone. *67 is the universal code for blocking your number from a person’s caller ID display. While this is the most primitive method of keeping yourself anonymous, it’s still an effective way of hiding your number if you’re making a single, harmless prank call to someone. *67 will not protect you if the police become involved. *67 usually doesn’t protect you against *69 (automatic call back) and never protects you against *57 (call trace). *67 will rarely protect you when you dial a toll-free number since they use a different system. Some internet-based telephone services such as Skype and Google Voice won’t let you dial *67 from their lines. So *67 is best used from a home phone or from a cell phone.

• Use internet telephones. Services like Skype and Google Voice are perfect for prank calls. Since they’re not tied to a physical location, it’s harder for your calls to be traced by authorities. (Not that you’re doing anything that would warrant the authorities attention, right????) As of this writing, Skype is only a few dollars a month and Google Voice comes free with your free Google account. When you initially set up Skype, it should let you chose if you want your number to display for people or not. Choose not! Google Voice doesn’t let you hide your number (or even use *67), but since you’re using an internet-based telephone number, it’s going to be nearly impossible for you to be found as long as you’re making prank calls that adhere to the rules of prank calling on this page.

  Don’t think that you’re completely anonymous and unfindable just because you’re using these services, though. Once you start breaking laws, the police know how to figure out which services you’re using and how to obtain warrants on those companies. They will trace the phone calls you’ve made to your email address and/or your home IP address (and every IP address you’ve ever used with that account) and they will find out who you are. I’ve read many news article about prank callers who’ve been arrested for making prank calls with Skype. It’s not that difficult for them to find you if you give them a reason to.

• Use caller I.D. spoofing. Companies like Spoofcard allow you to actually change the number that people see on their caller I.D. display. This is a really great service to use when you’re pranking someone and pretending to be from a certain company. When their caller I.D. display tells your victim that you’re calling from the local Domino’s Pizza, they have no reason to think that you’re not. Many people are completely unaware that caller I.D. spoofing exists, so this is a good thing to use to your advantage. The only downside is that spoofing services will charge you a few cents per minute to use this service. And don’t forget, even with caller I.D. spoofing, you’re only anonymous until you involve the police in your pranks.

• Use a pay phone. Back when I was a kid, there were these mystical devices outside of most businesses called “pay phones.” You could drop a few quarters into one and make completely anonymous phone calls with them. Pay phones are rumored to still exist today in some areas and you might be able to find one to aid in your prank calls. If your prank call causes enough grief and anguish, be prepared for the police to start looking a security camera footage and lifting fingerprints from the pay phone to put you away for life. Because of this, it’s best to wear a ski mask and mittens when prank calling from a pay phone.

• Use other phones that aren’t yours. You can sometimes find yourself with access to a phone inside of a department store or other business, which could be used to make prank calls. You could borrow a cell phone from a friend or a stranger, so that they’ll be left to deal with the fallout from your prank calls. Some people have even been known to carry a small phone with them and plug it into unattended phone jacks inside of a Wal-Mart or in the back of a neighbor’s house. But come on, we’re getting ridiculous here. No prank call is worth this much time and effort, right?

• Prepaid cell phones. It’s easy to buy a prepaid wireless phone from any department store or even a 7-Eleven. When you sign up for service on these, they don’t require you to give them any information. They’re completely anonymous, unless you’re using it from your home since they all have GPS in them. The downside is that they cost money.

• Be prepared. Know exactly what you’re going to say as soon as they pick up the phone. If you hesitate or stutter or sound unsure of yourself, you’re letting them know that you’re a prank caller. I’m not saying you need to script out your entire call, but at least be prepared with that opening line. First impressions are important. After that, just wing it.

• Be silly, not serious. This is important. Too many prank callers take themselves way too seriously, which, in my opinion, kind of takes the fun out of it. Don’t worry about if you’re believable or not or if they catch on and bust you. Who cares? Just call your target, be as weird as possible, and have fun. If you’re trying to trick your victim, do that first and then be silly at them. Personally I’m a fan of prank calls that fall apart at the end and you get to hear the victims find out that they’ve been had. Or better yet, the victims attempt to outsmart you.

• Don’t Laugh. Especially right at the beginning of the call, because your victim will immediately know that it’s a prank call and hang up the phone. Know where your mute button is and learn how to use it when you start snickering! Only begin laughing at them when the prank starts falling apart and you know that they’re not believing you anyway. Also, laughing at the end of a prank may help your victim understand that it’s just a dumb prank and they shouldn’t feel stressed about it or bother the police with it.

• A conversation is not a prank call. I hear a lot of “prank calls” that are nothing more than a guy having a conversation with his victim, occasionally throwing in moderately funny things into the conversation. The entire prank consists of the prank caller thinking it’s funny that he’s pretending to be someone that he’s not. Put a little more effort into your calls than this! Make sure the call is funny to other people who will hear it, not just you and your friends who know the victim.

• Keep it short. Extremely long prank calls can sometimes be funny, but who has time to listen for that long? People have short attention spans, so keep your pranks short. Try to keep them under 5 minutes if you can. If you go longer than 10 minutes, a lot of people will never hear the end of it. If you’re putting the recording of your prank call up for other people to hear, try to edit out the slow parts to shorten the call.

• Be prepared for police involvement. Even when you play by the rules, people are jerks and will claim that you threatened them, even when you didn’t. This isn’t common, but I’ve heard it happen many times. Because of this, the “don’t prank locally” rule should almost always apply.
  

We all know about the standard prank call, where you call up a phone number and you start talking to the victim. There is a lot more you can do than that, though. Here are some other types of prank calls that you’ve probably never thought of.

• Incoming Prank Calls. What’s better than making a prank phone call? How about receiving one? There are many ways to trick a victim into calling you so that you can mess with them. The easiest way to accomplish this is to place a free ad on Craigslist so that people call you. If you’re inside of a business and you have access to their telephone, you can pick it up when it rings and talk to their customers, just like RBCP did at Wal-Mart all day on Black Friday. If you want to spend money to receive prank calls, you could place an ad in a local newspaper. You could even take a job where you answer phones and screw with the customers that call in until you get fired. Here is a good example of an incoming prank phone call.

• Craigslist Prank Calls. As mentioned above, Craigslist is an invaluable resource for prank callers. Not only can you place an ad on Craigslist and mess with the people who call in, but you can browse the ads and call people who are selling their things or their services. That lady selling her baby stroller is always surprised when you offer her meth instead of cash.

• 3-Way Calling. Connecting people together can often result in confusion. Using the 3-way calling feature on your home phone, your cell or on Skype, you connect 2 people together while you silently listen to them each insist that the other called them. Timing is critical on these calls and it’s difficult to get them to both pick up at the same time. One way to avoid this problem is to tell the first victim, “This is AT&T, please hold while I connect your call…” and then you connect the other person. It’s fun to connect businesses to each other, such as a couple Chinese restaurants or some taxi dispatchers. Or what can really cause confusion is connecting two of your own friends together. Sometimes they’ll both assume that they were the one called and they’ll have a normal conversation. Better yet, connect people together that hate each other. Such as a nerd and a jock from school.

• Sound Boards. If you’re not good at coming up with anything to say to a victim, then a soundboard prank may be the way to go. Soundboards are nothing more than a huge screen of buttons on your computer that each play a different phrase when pressed. You can find a sound board for just about any movie or television character you can think of, such as this one for Chris from Family Guy or Arnold Schwarzenegger saying phrases from many of his movies. You can use these sound boards to prank people by setting your speaker phone close to your computer’s speakers and attempting to make the sound board have a conversation with your victim.

• Automated Prank Services. PrankDial.com will let you make prank calls to any phone number and you can select from hundreds of different prank calls. Some of their pranks will simply Rickroll a person while others will pretend to have conversations with them. PrankDial even lets you spoof your caller I.D. and records the phone calls so you can listen to them later. And best of all, PrankDial works from your cell phone, so you can prank people or businesses right in front of them and they’ll never know it’s you. This is great for walking into a 7-Eleven or a Deli, being able to watch the clerk’s confusion as he/she attempts to deal with a crazed phone caller. It’s also a great way to amuse yourself while you’re waiting around at the DMV or sitting in a bar.

• Wikipedia article on prank calling. There’s a few historical things that are worth reading on the wiki page.

• Cacti Radio. This is a prank call radio station that plays prank calls 24 hours a day and has 4 live shows every week.

• Madhouse Live. Here’s a place for thousands of prank calls, prank call forums and a prank call podcast.

• PLA Radio. This is our own podcast that contains lots of prank calls and other humor.

So what are you waiting for? If you really just read this entire guide to prank calling, then you owe it to yourself to pick up a phone right now and do it! That’s right, pick it up and start dialing. There you go. Wait! What the hell, man, you’re dialing locally? Have you not learned anything here??? God, I hate you. Go back and read all this again right now!

I know that this guide is far from being complete. That’s why I’d like you to help me complete it. If you feel that something is missing, please post it in the comments below and I will eventually add it to this page. If you don’t want to post it in the comments, then email it to me instead.

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One of my favorite online comics, Toothpaste For Dinner, recently gave us a crazy idea for a prank phone call – calling up our landlords and demanding that they reimburse us for all the sand we had dumped into our apartments. For the most part, land lords were just confused, but a few of them got really frustrated and angry when they heard about our amazing sand renovations.

Clearly our prank calls are making apartment managers and landlords really appreciate the mundane problems they have to deal with every day. Once the initial shock wears off and they finally check their tenants apartments and find no sand damage, they realize how good they’ve had it. Sure they have to deal with noise problems and tenants who can never pay their rent by the first, but at least nobody is filling up their apartments with sand!

If those calls above aren’t enough for you, then listen to a lady tell RBCP to get out of her life, another one get mad enough to do a “24 hour walkthrough,” one who laughs at RBCP’s problems and then he threatens revenge on another. Also listen to OhEmGee run into some confusion with commercial property, then get upset because a lady won’t believe her story, then she accidentally admits that she has a cat and demands use of the landlord’s shovel and a lady refuses to knock on OhEmGee’s window since her door is blocked with sand.

And most importantly, be sure to go take a look at toothpastefordinner.com for his extensive collection of prank call ideas!

Installing Sand in my Apartment [ 5:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3757)

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For the past few months, OhEmGee, aka a long-time PLA girl whose name we are never again allowed to utter, has been doing a live prank call show on Cacti Radio. The show airs each Wednesday night at 9pm PST. Listeners meet in our tinychat room and on efnet’s #phonelosers. OhEmGee guarantees that each show will have at least 25% more fun than the last. You can listen to old episodes by visiting cactiradio.com/funshow/ or you can subscribe to the RSS/Podcast feed if you’re lazy. Or forget about her dumb website and feed and just listen to a few of the episodes below:

the FUN show – 04/20/11 – Four Twenty! – I prank call some people that are selling items for $420 and accuse them of hiding their pot selling business. It doesn’t work out well so some people “from the internet” call in and Aikison continues to spam the show with “420″ in a computer voice. Lots of other stuff happens but I’m lazy so I guess you get the general idea. At about 50 minutes in, it gets hilarious when we call foreign taxi guy. He gives Americans some great advice at the end of our show. Included is an aftershow! After the show, there’s a talk with Rappy and his friend Shinobe. I end up getting my heart broken, but the wedding is still on. Phractal, my virtual boyfriend, calls in while I am talking to Rappy and shit gets REAL…

04/06/2011 – Movie Theatre Confessions – We call up movie theatres and confess to terrible things! It’s a spin off of the gas station confessions, but equally as funny. Guests include RBCP (who broadcasted the show for me and edited it,) Rob the Hyena, LT Matt, and a failing Corwin.

The FUN show – 03/30/11 – Rob the Hyena coshosts. This is the one that we prepped a prank call and then…well you’ll see what happens. I didn’t know we were so mainstream! Then we call best buy but I hate it so I cut most of that out. RBCP interviews me about my biege boxing date. There’s an aftershow but I’m not posting it yet.

The FUN show – 03/23/11 – Cat Lady! – Phractal calls in talks about actual phreaking stuff but he gets bored with it so we call weather girl. Aikison discusses his dealings with a 14 year old relentless girl who called him over and over. We check on a guy whose voicemail was hacked last week. The outgoing message is still there! Bowling alley prank call failed but it was a good idea…maybe we’ll do it again another time. Snarky’s at it again. Skype problems! Leet fails to be leet. Other stuff. Aikison confesses to a guy’s voicemail. Snarky. TheN uses a phone with a curly cord. Fix nipples. You can’t hack iphones. Chris Chan’s voicemail. Lady has a cat problem but the show ends. You can’t hear the outro music and I don’t care. She calls back after the show ends and is going to the cop shop right now!

The Fun Show - 04-06-2011 [ 1:10:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2920)

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I’ve set up a page for the prank calls we’ve made to people who like to complain about businesses on Twitter. It’s at www.phonelosers.org/complainers. Go listen to me, Matt and Legend screw with complainers.

I’ve also updated our page of PLA music with gnnr’s new Mildred Monday song, my Curtis Lee Jones song, RTF’s Bell Odyssey and Trevelyn’s Ode to the PLA Forums.

And speaking of Mildred Monday, I’ve updated the PLA Memorial with a page dedicated to Mildred Monday. Go there and you can listen to most of the calls we made to her in the 1990s.

If you’ve been watching our YouTube page you’ve probably noticed a lot of answering machine hacking contests to win the PLA book. Congratulations to Mario, Finn and Liz for winning free copies of the PLA book! We’ll probably keep having answering machine contests as long as I can continue to find more old answering machines. If you’re too lazy to hack an answering machine for a book, you can still preorder books for just $10.

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Every year or so, I unleash a torrent unto the world, containing everything the PLA has ever done on it. This year the size has doubled to 10 gigs of PLA videos, text files, pictures, songs, skits and prank calls. You’ll also get every episode of The Phone Show and PLA Radio. Here is the link for you:

Also, during my fit of torrent creating today, I made another torrent of all the prank call albums I have. So if you have time to listen to about 2.4 gigs of additional prank calls once you’re done with all the PLA material, here’s the link:

In other news…the PLA Book is on track to be released before Winter. The finishing touches are going into it now, so you may as well go ahead and preorder the book by going to www.phonelosers.org/store/ where you’ll save a few bucks off the regular price and you’ll receive your copy about a week before anyone else gets it. For now, the $3.00 shipping price is good for all countries.

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Over the past week I’ve spent countless hours, scouring my hard drives for collections of prank calls that I never got around to releasing on phonelosers.org. They’re all calls done by me (RBCP) and The Spessas. Some are several years old and some were done just a week or two ago. I’ve added links to them all up in the “Our Pranks” section of the menu bar. Below are a few calls from each of the new sections.

Click here to listen to more dealership calls.

Click here to listen to more 1-900 line calls.

Click here to listen to more old people calls.

Click here to listen to more prayer line calls.

I’m still sifting through my hard drives and there are many more prank calls to go through and post to the site. Hopefully I won’t get bored with all this editing anytime soon and there will be a lot more pranks posted on the site in the coming weeks.

Hey, as long as you’re here, take a look up on the top of the right sidebar and you’ll see some sort of Google member thing that you can add yourself to if you’ve got a Google account. I’m not sure what the benefit of it is, but it sure feels good to belong to something, right?

And why haven’t you carved a PLA pumpkin yet???

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It’s been a couple years since I made a torrent of the PLA Media Pack and put it up for download. Last time I did this, the “DVD” was a mere 2.5 gigs. Now it’s more than double that size, thanks to all the videos, PLA Radio and Phone Shows we’ve done since then.

So click here and use your favorite bittorrent client to download all of our stuff for free. You’ll get hundreds of PLA prank calls, text files, videos, pictures, and lots more.

You can help us share the love by leaving it seeded for awhile after you’ve downloaded it, to help others get it quicker. And if you have a spare moment, list this torrent on your favorite bittorrent site to help spread the gospel of PLA.

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On last night’s Phone Show Legend called in and told us about his mid-80′s prank on a Florida church school. Legend called the school and claimed to be from NASA in Houston and said their school had been randomly selected to talk with Commander Crippen from the Discovery space shuttle which was currently orbiting the Earth at 17,400 miles per hour. Of course the school bought it and assembled all of the students together to let some of them talk to a real astronaut in space.

To add to the authenticity (and hilarity) Legend had his Commodore 64 computer set up to make all kinds of “space noises” in the background, such as beeping and static. For 2 full hours Legend kept teachers and students on the phone, answering questions such as, “What would happen if an astronaut sneezed?”

“It would propel you against the wall,” Legend replies. He also claimed that they were fixing satellites and all kinds of other nonsense.

Legend says he was 16 at the time and bored as hell. One thing lead to another and the next thing he knows he’s wasted 2 hours of the church school’s valuable time. After 2 hours his ADD started kicking in so he hung up. It was around that time that the school discovered they had been pranked.

Legend has been a member of the various PLA communities for most of this decade and you can often find him hanging out on the PLA Voice Bridge. He even helped RBCP stalk that wacky morning DJ from PLA Radio Episode #14. Legend’s NASA prank could be one of the world’s first large-scale pranks by phone. Have you ever heard of any pranks this awesome happening before the mid-80′s? Tell us about it in the comments section below. It’s just too bad none of it was recorded by Legend or by the school.

To listen to our interview with Legend, visit www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow. The full newspaper article of the incident is below.

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