Earlier this week, I was having a nice romantic dinner with Rappy McRapperson at Red Robin, and we noticed an advertisement on the table encouraging everyone to tweet with the hashtag of #banzailoveyou to win free meals and other prizes. Rappy, who was clearly a victim of my bad influence over the past few days, immediately suggested that we tweet something horrible about Red Robin, using their hashtag. A few moments later, using all 3 of my Twitter accounts on my smartphone and then Rappy’s, the following twats were posted.
Now, I have nothing against Red Robin and I think their food is awesome. I eat there with my kids and my friends several times a year and have had nothing but great experiences there. So please, don’t think that my tweets are out of retaliation for poor service or rude staff. Red Robin is a great place and I highly recommend them to everyone that reads this. I’m just an asshole, though, and I think the idea of writing horrible things about them is hilarious. So I started a thread on the PLA Forums, encouraging others to join in the fun and tweet crazy things.
You’ll notice that these first few tweets have two i’s in the hashtag. This apparently is incorrect, as you’ll see on the official contest page, but I swear there were two i’s on the card we saw on the table. I had to look at it each time I made a new tweet from the restaurant and there’s just no way I made the exact same mistake all three times. Legitimate customers were tweeting with 2 i’s too, so it’s not just me. No really!
Right around here is when things got completely out of control. Our wacky tweets are now outnumbering the legitimate contest tweets. Prepare yourself for a gigantic list of hilarious tweets, all by people who noticed our tweets and began writing things 500 times more awesome than we could come up with.
As all of these hilarious tweets were coming in yesterday, keeping me and Rappy LOLing most of the day, Carlito began messaging me from a Red Robin in Pennsylvania. He just happened to be eating there and managed to get an awesome picture of him and the Red Robin mascot. Then he sent me the picture of his Banzai burger, which you saw at the beginning of this post.
Having pictures coming in from Carlito as all of these tweets were happening just added to the hilarity for me and Rappy. The tweets are still continuing today and show no sign of slowing down yet. So a ton of thanks goes out to all the people who’ve given us nonstop lulz these past 48 hours.
I’m not going to say you all should continue doing this, but the contest does last for another month, until February 19th, and it sure is making a lot of people laugh. We’re fairly certain that even the Red Robin corporate people are snickering about it in their corporate meetings (you guys are welcome for that!). If you’d like to enter Red Robin’s contest, all you have to do is follow @redrobinburgers and then tweet something (the contest rules don’t specify what should be tweeted) with the hashtag of #banzailoveyou. You can read all about the contest at redrobin.com/banzailoveyou.
Once again, RED ROBIN IS AWESOME! Don’t believe any of the craziness that you’ve read above. Well, except for the part about the staff stealing my wallet and shooting my wife in the foot – that shit is totally true. If our silliness is making you laugh, though, then you should definitely go eat some overpriced food at the Red Robin nearest you.
Thanks to Rappy McRapperson for making this happen and to Carlito from Madhouse Live for the pictures. Most of all, thanks to all the Twitter users that have given me and us other PLA’ers lots of hysterical laughter these past 48 hours!
Below is a live Twitter feed of all current #banzailoveyou posts.
January 17th Update! Just a day after posting this entry on phonelosers.org, Red Robin suddenly began heavily promoting their Banzai Burger contest by emailing people on their mailing list and encouraging them to tweet with #banzailoveyou. They also began constantly tweeting, “Put your tweets where your mouth is. Head to Red Robin, enjoy a Banzai Burger & Tweet the love! #BanzaiLoveYou” to get people to respond with the hashtag. As a result, our crazy tweets have been quickly scrolling away for days now, making it pointless to even do it anymore. Well played, Red Robin. Well played.
Another odd thing – when we started doing this, the description on the Red Robin Twitter account had the name of the guy who ran it. As in, the personal name of the guy in their public relations department, or whoever runs it in corporate Red Robin Land. But as soon as they started fighting back at us, his name disappeared from the description. Now it just says “Official Home of Insanely Delicious Gourmet Burgers.” We’re not sure if taking the name off had anything to do with us, but we’re going to pretend it did because we’re such scary people and he just didn’t want any trouble.
In the newest episode of PLA TV, we pretend to be radio DJs calling pay phones and get people to do things for money. The videos in this prank span quite a few years, from 2003 to 2009. RBCP’s first attempt at this nearly earned him an arrest.
At the pet store pay phone, EvilCal and Mrs. EvilCal join in for the fun. The mother of the girl who spotted our camera pulls up next to us and asks what we plan to do with the footage. She says she doesn’t want the footage on the internet because of perverts seeing her daughter. Because, you know, grainy YouTube video shot from 100′ across a parking lot is much worse than a pervert seeing her precious snowflake in person somewhere.
In 2004, at the Wilsonville pay phone, Heywood and Heather from messedup.net provide the creamy, chocolaty hazelnut spread and provide a perfect pay phone to film. Heywood’s lost footage showed video of those big girls attempting to run as Heywood comments, “Geez, try the McSalad!”
Most of the music in that video is provided by at independent band called The Rhodes, which I found on the podsafe music site. Originally I had much more fitting background music, but as soon as I uploaded it to YouTube, their system automatically detected the copyrighted music (even with me switching the levels and talking over it) and pulled the video down. So I just kind of threw on the first independent band I could find. I’ll put a little more effort into using independent music for the next PLA project. (Check out Jenn’s Guide to defeating YouTube’s copyright filters. I should try that next time.)
What would you ask a stranger at a pay phone to do, using the DJ ruse? I’d like to try this prank again someday, so make some suggestions in the comments!
For the past year I’ve been working on a website called Sign Hacker. It’s there not only to showcase past PLA sign exploits, such as the McDonalds Sign, the Taco Bell sign and my own personalsign pranks, but to find new sign pranks on the net and feature them. There are a lot of awesome sign pranks out there that I want to write about on the site. Fake sign pranks are hilarious and need a good home on the web.
Recently Spessa has started writing posts on signhacker.com, detailing her daily adventures of screwing with public signs. And her adventures have inspired me to put a little more work into the site and I’ve started printing up my own stickers to put up in public. Such as these…
Now it’s time for me and Spessa to hopefully inspire even more people to participate in this kind of craziness. I set up a page called Sign Hacker Printables where you can print out the signs we’ve created. You can spend a little money for sticker labels like we did, or just print them on paper and tape them up. Do this! And then take pictures and send them to us. This will make us giggle uncontrollably.
I’ve also set up a new board on the PLA Forums for discussing our sign hacks and planning new ones. You can find that by clicking here. Get on there and suggest some new sign ideas so we can steal your ideas and post about them. Let’s have some fun by confusing the general public with bizarre signs!
Dear RBCP,
I read your article on how to modify a CB radio to broadcast on drive-thru frequencies today. It was a great article, and a good YouTube video as well. I liked it so much, I stopped by my local RadioShack after work. I asked the employee to direct me to the CB radios. He showed me the TRC-241. I said to him "I see the screen is digital; but is the CB radio fully digital?"
He went off to look up the specs. Meanwhile I pulled up phonelosers.org on my cellphone. I saw the model number you wrote down was an earlier version of what I was looking at. I interrupted the guy, saying "Never mind, the model you have looks fine. I'll take it." He responds "Is there anything else I can get you?" – "No, not unless you sell toasters." Perplexed his really cute female co-worker looked over, smiled, and asked me "What are you going to do with that?" I replied "Well see, toasters have a crystal that operates on a higher frequency, which will help me test a theory." Grining, I paid the man, gave a very flirtatious good-bye to the girl and went to Target.
I found their cheapest model for about 7 bucks. I was so excited to get some pranks going tonight, I couldn’t stand it. I kept fantasizing about how I was going to have a lot of fun, and maybe impress some friends.
I got home and set down the two items on my desk. I thought to myself "Hey, I'll film this as proof it can be done!" I set up my camera, hit record, and began to take apart the toaster. I was trying to be as entertaining as possible, all the while, sounding as educated about what I was doing (much like you were). I took off the knob and slider handle. Then I took off the bottom of the toaster; then the side. I saw a tiny circuit board, resting on the bottom of a support plate – mocking me. "Wait a second!?" I thought. "There should be a crystal soldered onto this board! RB said *all* toasters have these as a safety measure!"
I then took apart the CB radio and looked for the crystal there as well, only to find nothing. “What the fuck? 0 for 2, and I'm out $100+!” Surely I bought the wrong model, or sported for a toaster that was too cheap. I thought the comment section of your post would be a good start. Anyone that has run into trouble with this would have posted a solution, or their concern.
I was right. Someone said that the post was made near April 1st. I checked the YouTube page of the video, and plenty of people were shouting "this is so fake! you people are idiots!," etc. I knew right then, I have just been had. I started laughing to myself. I couldn’t believe that I wouldn't have second-guessed such a simple tutorial from you, the mighty trickster. I went back to the RadioShack and saw that the people I dealt with, had already gone home. I explained to the other guy that I was a victim of an elaborate joke, and how I took apart a toaster in order to get to a high-frequency crystal. The guy looked at me like I was the biggest moron on the planet, while he shook his head. "No.. No. You’re not going to find a crystal like that in a toaster." He replied.
To say the least, he refunded me my money. *whew!*
Thanks, RBCP, for giving me the motivation to tear apart a toaster!
So…it’s been a few months now and I guess it’s as good of a time as any to state the semi-obvious…that article about modifying toasters and the accompanying YouTube video on the subject were hoaxes. There is no crystal inside a toaster to “control the frequency of the heating coils” and you can’t replace anything inside a CB radio to make it transmit on a drive-thru frequency. Sure, there are ways to hijack fast food frequencies, but using a CB radio and/or a toaster isn’t the way to go about it. Our goal was to destroy as many toasters on the planet as possible.
This turned out to be my most widespread hoax, thanks to Gizmodo, Consumerist, Fark and Digg linking to it. The video was watched over 100,000 times and I don’t know how many people visited the phonelosers.org article on the same subject. It was a lot, though. I received at least 50 emails about toasters and many threads were created on the PLA Forums by new users, begging for help on the subject. We deleted a lot of them, but here are some of the surviving threads…
Even better than the forum posts were the YouTube comments on this prank. You’ll notice that many of the first comments were positive reviews of the video, a lot of them claiming that they tried the mod and it worked beautifully. These were mostly made by people from the PLA Forums, just trying to make the video more realistic by backing up the claims that it worked. The rest of the posts fall into these three categories:
You asshole, your prank cost me money! You suck!
Haha, your prank cost me money! You rule!
I’m so smart that I realize this is a prank and I’m desperate to prove this to everyone.
I have a lot of emails that are pretty funny, but I’m too lazy to search through my archived email, looking for the best ones. Many thanks to all the people who helped with this prank by debunking the debunkers on YouTube and by stringing along the new users on the forums. And a huge thanks to Zan, who not only had an awesome sense of humor about the whole thing, but even sent in the picture of himself with a disassembled toaster. Go visit his iNFEKTiD website and pay your respects!
And to you people who were hoping to hijack drive-thru frequencies – shame on you! Messing with minimum wage employees is wrong and very un-Christian-like! People like you cost these businesses lots of money and you shouldn’t be thinking of doing things like this! Shame, shame shame!
Yesterday I noticed some hits coming to phonelosers.org from an unfamiliar YouTube page, so I clicked on the link and heard a prank call by Mr. Spessa where he was calling up hotel guests and pissing them off with his impromptu policies. Only these were brand new calls that I’d never heard before. This YouTube guy, w3baholicX, took one of Mr. Spessa’s hotel pranks, turned it into a soundboard and started pranking new hotels with it. Take a listen…
w3baholicX was nice enough to send me the soundboard, so I’m putting it up here so that everyone can use it to make prank calls to hotels without using their real voice. Click here to use the soundboard. (WARNING: It’s HUGE. About 11 megs.) If you do anything particularly hilarious with this soundboard, post a link to it in the comments section.
You might also enjoy the one other soundboard on this site – the RBCP Soundboard. It was made by Heywood from the old Curtis Lee Jones pranks. (I used to have a Curtis soundboard, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere.)
To hear the original hotel pranks, visit our hotel page. And if you enjoy soundboard pranks, you’ll really like w3baholicX’s YouTube page, which is filled with them.
A few years back, some friends and I were messing around with a Taco Bell’s drive-thru frequencies. RijilV and isotek showed me how easy it was to hijack the frequencies of just about any fast food restaurant with a very simple mod to a ham radio. The radios they used were Yaesu VX-5 and VX-7 models. We had a few weeks of occasional fun, sitting a few parking lots away and saying all kinds of horrible things to potential fast food customers. For the most part, I didn’t record any of it. But you can find a few clips of our fast food hijinks if you scroll down on the PLA Sound Clips Archive page.
Finally we decided to capture a bit of our FCC violations on video. But instead of capturing actual customers being harassed by us as they placed an order, I drove through the Taco Bell drive-thru myself with a video camera sitting on the dashboard. As I attempted to place my order, RijilV informed me of some crazy new Taco Bell policies and a manager immediately rushed out to explain to me that I wasn’t actually talking to an employee. Here is that video:
After spending several years on Google Video and YouTube, it’s been watched approximately 20,000 times. And of those 20,000 people who have viewed it, approximately all of them have emailed me and asked me what kind of radio we used and how can they use a radio to do the same thing. So in the spirit of April 1st and in order to quell the number of emails sent to me and posts on the PLA Forums asking the same thing, I’ve decided to write this tutorial to help those people out.
But I’m not going to explain how to modify a Yaesu VX5 or a Yaesu VX7. A simple Googlesearch will show you how to modify these ham radios. The problem with these mods is that, even though they’re fairly simple, you have to buy the radios which could cost you anywhere from $200 – $400. Then, after removing a couple solder points, you have to learn how to use it, you have to look up fast food frequency lists, you have to understand the difference between the transmit frequencies and the receive frequencies and you have to scroll through PL tones using trial and error to find the correct one.
Or how about we do this a different way. A way that uses a couple items that you might already have in your home. You can easily modify most old CB radios in a way that will allow them to transmit directly to drive-thru frequencies. You won’t have to scroll through hundreds of possible drive-thru frequencies, because a CB radio’s channels line up in exactly the same way as most drive-thru’s channels, only at a higher frequency. How do you get your CB radio to run at a higher frequency? A simple replacement of the crystal inside, with a 6.5536 MHz crystal. This triples the megahertz that are broadcast on and there is no learning required. You just take the modified CB radio to a fast food restaurant and start broadcasting to the customers.
“But RBCP, I don’t have a 6.5536 MHz crystal lying around my house,” you might be whining at this point. But this isn’t true. Just about any house has several 6.5536 MHz crystals in them if you know where to look. This just happens to be the exact same crystal that you can find in electric heaters, hair dryers, electric stoves, curling irons, electric hot water heaters, irons, and toasters. These crystals are in just about any item that has heated coils and are used to control the frequency of the heating elements so that they don’t burn your house down.
So for this modification you need…
1 CB radio. It has to be a 40 channel CB radio with a digital display, which includes just about any CB radio manufactured after the mid 1980′s. The old 23 channel CBs from the 1970′s will not work. It can even be a walkie talkie CB radio. If you don’t have one, you can find one at Goodwill or a yard sale for probably less than $10.
1 toaster. (Or other item with heating elements inside.) A toaster is the most ideal to use, because it’s almost guaranteed to have the crystal inside of it. It’s more common to find curling irons and hair dryers that don’t. Again, it should be a toaster manufactured within the past 20 years or so. Before that they didn’t have crystal requirements for toaster manufacturers. (And incidentally, there were a lot more electrical house fires back then.) Goodwill will probably have a toaster for less than $10.
1 soldering iron and solder. Don’t worry if you don’t have soldering experience. It’s actually pretty easy. Click here for a soldering tutorial. You can purchase a soldering iron at Radio Shack or Sears for about $10.
A few screwdrivers
Even if you have to buy all these materials, you’re only out $30. That’s a lot better than the $300 you might end up spending on a Yaesu radio. And some of you might already have all these items so you don’t have to pay anything. Ask a friend or a relative if they’ve got an old toaster or CB radio lying around that they don’t need.
First you’ll want to take apart your toaster. This isn’t too hard. Just flip it upside down and start removing the screws. You’ll probably need to pull off the plastic lever and knobs before you remove the top of the toaster. Once you have the top off, you’ll see a green or brown circuit board inside.
Flip the circuit board down and you’ll see all the components on the other side, including the 6.5536 MHz crystal. The crystal is silver and will have 6.5 stamped on the side of it. In the picture below, I’ve used an arrow to show you where it’s located.
The crystal is likely in a different spot in other toasters, but it’s hard to mistake for any other electronic component. The crystal will have some form of 6.5 stamped on the side of it. In my toaster, it showed 6.55-12. While the official frequency needed is 6.5536 MHz, anything within 1.6 megahertz will work. So don’t worry if your crystal just says 6.5 or 6.50 – it’s all the same for our purposes.
It’s kind of hard to see what I’m doing in the picture above, but I’m heating up the leads on the crystal from underneath with my soldering iron to melt the solder, and I’m pulling on the crystal from above with a pair of needle nose pliers. It only takes a few seconds to get the crystal out of the toaster.
Now that the crystal is out of your toaster, throw your toaster away! Do not attempt to use it once the crystal is removed. Remember, the crystal is in there for safety and using your toaster without the crystal could burn your toast and/or start a kitchen fire. It’s likely your toaster won’t even turn on with the missing crystal, but please don’t even try. Just throw it away.
As I mentioned before, just about any brand and model of CB radio will work, as long as it has the digital display on it. Which means, just about any CB radio manufactured after the mid 1980′s. These are the kinds of CB radios whose frequencies are controlled by a single crystal inside of them. For my mod, I used a Radio Shack TRC-207 walkie talkie CB radio, which is pictured above. I prefer using a walkie talkie CB radio because it doesn’t requiring sticking a huge CB antenna on the roof of my car which might be noticed if a fast food employee starts looking around the parking lot for the culprits.
Taking apart your CB radio is just as easy as taking apart the toaster. Remove the screws and pop it open. You may or may not have to lift up the circuit board inside to find the crystal inside. In my particular model, the crystal actually plugged into a socket so I didn’t need to even desolder the old crystal. I just pulled it out with my fingers and then plugged in the new 6.55 MHz crystal. I don’t know how common this is, because in other CB radios that I’ve modified the crystal was soldered to the circuit board, just like in the toaster.
Put your CB back together and test it to make sure it’s working. You’re finished! Obviously, you won’t be able to talk on normal CB channels anymore since your CB is transmitting and receiving at a much higher frequency now. But who cares, CB channels are lame anyway. Let’s hop in the car and drive to our nearest fast food establishment to test it out.
Sit near the drive-thru and wait for a customer to pull up. While the customer is talking to the drive-thru speaker, start flipping through your channels until you hear them talking. I’ve found that most drive thrus end up being somewhere in the 16 – 25 channel range. I’ve never found one above channel 30 and only a few on channels 1 through 15. It all depends on how their drive-thru is set up and what frequencies they’re using. Anyway, push down your talk button and start talking to the customer.
The cool thing about using a CB radio to transmit on drive-thru frequencies is that a CB is designed to work for several miles. The headsets that those fast food people wear are only designed to work for about 100 feet. So you can easily overpower the employees, even if you’re several parking lots away. In fact, you may be inadvertently screwing with several other drive-thrus in town without even knowing it. This is more likely when you’re using the kind of CB radio that’s supposed to be installed in a car. Those usually run on 5 watts and can cover an entire city. This is another reason I like to use my walkie talkie. It’s lucky if it will work for even a mile, so I’m only harassing one restaurant at a time.
If you found this tutorial useful, you might also enjoy the video I’ve made on the same subject. It includes much of the same information in this tutorial, but also includes actual footage of us messing with a drive-thru with this CB mod. Enjoy!
Recently while doing a search for prank calls on Google’s blog search, I came across a strange video of a guy dressed up in drag and prank calling a Taco Bell. While he mostly just screamed at the Taco Bell employee, it was still a pretty amusing call. It was from a site called revver.com which I wasn’t familiar with. So I went back to their main page and did a site search for “Taco Bell prank” and…holy crap… The person that did the call had HUNDREDS of video prank calls while dressed in various forms of drag.
After watching about a dozen videos of this guy, I’ve decided to share them with you. Check out his videos by going to this URL:
After you’ve had your fill of hundreds of prank phone calls there (1,095 videos this person has up), take a look at his Myspace and his Stickam. He’s even got a domain at sharolaid.com but it only links to his video prank calls.
As a new fan of Sharolaid’s, I’m not sure WHY he dresses in drag and makes prank phone calls, since it’s not clearly spelled out for me on any of his pages. I guess I need to start watching his show on Stickam to get it. All I know is that the phone calls are pretty damn amusing and everyone should listen to at least a few of them.
During a recent stay at a very nice and very large hotel in Reno, we decided that lots of fun would happen if we could just find the frequencies to our hotel. Using information given to the maids and maintenance people has always worked out for us in the past. Eventually we got several hotel frequencies by calling up housekeeping and talking a maid out of the FCC ID on her radio. She was more than happy enough to pull the battery out of her radio and read the information to us. Using the FCC’s FCC ID search we were able to find several hotel frequencies and put them to good use. Wait a second, that’s not what this update is about.
This update is about opening up phone jacks in hotel rooms. For some reason, pretty much any large hotel in America thinks a flimsy piece of plastic is adequate protection against people who might want to tap into the phone lines of other rooms in a hotel. When you open up the phone jack in a hotel room, you’ll see something like this:
A hotel phone jack should only have one set of wires in it. The wires for your phone line(s). But as you see in the picture, the area behind my phone jack had 3 extra cat5 cables running through it, all easily accessible to anyone with a screwdriver. Using a Leatherman, I was able to strip the insulation from the wires and test the lines on each one. Each of the 3 lines had a dial tone. I only tried the blue/blue-white wires in each cat5 cable since that’s what my phone line was hooked to. But I bet if I kept stripping wires I probably could have found more.
Now a sensible, morally grounded hacker would have said, “Hmmm, that’s interesting” and put the jack back on the wall and maybe anonymously alerted someone in charge of this security flaw. But I’m no hacker – I’m a huge asshole. Team Spessa and I used this elite exploit to irritate dozens of hotel guests and employees in the middle of the night.
I found out the room numbers of each line by calling the front desk from each of them, asking a random question and then saying, “Oh, by the way, what’s our room number?” We ended up with the phone lines for a room upstairs, the room next door to us, and a room two doors down. But I needed to be able to switch between lines so that when hotel security started banging on our door, I could quickly switch them back before answering the door. I’m paranoid, okay? I mean really, what are the odds that anyone would figure it out?
I walked around the streets of Reno, looking for a place that might sell some phone jacks or wiring since I hadn’t come prepared with anything that I could easily hook into these extra lines. During my search I ended up in a sleazy-looking liquor store and was surprised to find that they sold the perfect item – a dual line in-wall phone jack. It was so strange that a liquor store would sell this item. It was the only phone-related item on their shelf, yet it was perfect for my needs. The phone gods were looking out for me. I paid my $2.99 and headed back to the hotel.
Since the jack had two separate RJ-11 jacks on it, I was able to hook our own room onto the top jack and then one of the other rooms into the bottom jack. This way we could have easy access to another room’s phone jack for days and the maid would never notice it. In the end it looked like this:
On our last night at the hotel, after a late night of gambling, we entered our room at 2am and began making calls. Team Spessa came up with the crazy idea of pissing off as many people as we possibly could for the sole purpose of going into the lobby and witnessing the chaos. Pissing off the guests was easy enough. Our page of hotel prank calls will convince you of that. But tonight our goal was to get as many guests down in the lobby as possible, so many of our calls were very generic, made for the sole purpose of getting people into the lobby instead of being simply to make us giggle. The giggling would come later. Here’s an idea of how many of the calls went…
Switch Rooms Tonight We call up a lady and ask her to switch rooms so a celebrity can have their favorite room. Notice how when she’s in doubt and asks if this is a joke, all we have to do is tell her that it’s not a joke and she’s completely convinced. This happened in almost all the calls.
For close to an hour we called random rooms all over the hotel. We told one guy that our geiger counter was showing unusual levels of radiation around his room and we needed to move him out of his room. Others were told that they were making too much noise and they needed to come down and prove that they were quiet people. Many of them were upset that we were insisting that they’d ordered room service and would have to come down to have the charges removed. And then there were these people…
Carrot Top This lady is appalled that she has to leave her room at 3:00am just so a celebrity can have his favorite room. But when she finds out that the celebrity is Carrot Top, she has a fit. Full credit for this one goes to Mr. Spessa who kept whispering at me what to say. I ruin it in the end and the lady probably doesn’t come to the front desk, but the call is just too funny not to post here.
Room Service This stuttering lady is extremely upset that the front desk is charging her for room service as her husband rants in the background about calling the cops.
Noisy BabyMr. Spessa tells a guest that they need to keep their baby quiet, then convinces him to come down to the front desk.
Shut The Fuck Up We kindly ask a guest to shut the fuck up and he doesn’t find anything strange about this. His wife sure isn’t happy, though.
Illegal Music A guest denies that they’re downloading music illegally from their hotel room. They finally agree to come to the front desk to assure us that their cell phone isn’t responsible.
In the end, about 40 hotel guests were called with nearly all of them agreeing to come down to the front desk. I visited the front desk near the beginning and witnessed a young couple complaining about their fake room service order to several perplexed employees. And later, Mr. Spessa went down and complained to the front desk about the call that he was going to have to vacate his room for a celebrity. He claimed that he had to wake his entire family and they were all packing their things so they could move to another room. As he stood at the front desk, other guests were complaining to other employees and phone calls from pissed off guests were coming in from other rooms. During this time, Spessa and I took turns looking through our door’s peephole at the guests coming out of their rooms to go to downstairs. The entire hotel was alive with very irritated people.
In the end, the hotel was nice enough to credit all of our nights except for one and apologized for the inconvenience about a bajillion times. So not only did we get to see live entertainment in the lobby, nearly our entire stay was free! Thanks, hotel people!
Be sure to listen to the rest of our hotel calls at http://www.phonelosers.org/hotel/. There’s a few new calls up, including some that weren’t included in this update.
I was strolling through Target a week or so ago with Spessa and we happened to notice that they were selling buttons on an endcap, right next to all the Hallmark cards. The buttons were called Attitudes and had various sayings on them, such as “Wingman” and “Single” and “Rockstar.” I just [i]knew[/i] that all the hip teenagers today must be wearing these buttons.
I also noticed that these were 1″ buttons, which just happens to be a size that I’m able to produce at home with my Tecre Model 100 Button Machine. I picked up a couple packs and took them home, planning to replace the buttons inside with more racy sayings and images on them and then return them for a refund. With the help of Mr. & Mrs. Spessa, we came up with the following buttons.
In case you’re too lazy to enlarge the image above, the buttons say HIV+, Stud Muffin, Animal Sex (endorsed by George W. Bush), Kill Whitey, It’s a Digital Watch!, Fred Meyer Sucks, Shit on my Tits (endorsed by a naked girl with shit on her tits) and Anal Warts are Awesome.
We decided against the idea of returning them to the service desk since that would cause the buttons to go through the hands of at least a couple of employees, giving them the chance to be noticed before they went back on the shelves. Instead I just sucked up the $1.99 that I paid for each of them and snuck them back onto the shelf myself. We snapped a few pictures and then went home.
We checked back a couple times the next day and the buttons were still there. I was really hoping that one of them would be gone and one would still be there, meaning that a customer had purchased one. Two days later we checked once again and both packs of buttons were gone. Either a customer had purchased both of them or they had been discovered by an employee. We called Target and talked to a manager about the buttons but they didn’t seem to know anything about them. So maybe, just maybe…somebody is walking around town wearing these buttons.
Since June of 1998 I’ve resided in a small Illinois town on the Muddy Mississippi called Alton. And recently, somewhat against my will, I’ve finally moved away from there, across the country and into a small Oregon town. In the seven years that I’ve resided in Alton, I’ve spearheaded many projects designed solely to irritate local residents and to amuse myself and/or friends. It’s hard to say whether or not Alton will miss my various forms of harassment and schemes. In one sense, my friends and I really pissed off quite a few people. But on the other hand, many more people laughed as a result. It’s not easy to weigh the good/evil in all of my schemes. For the most part I guess I don’t care since I was rarely the butt of the jokes.
Below is a brief synopsis of almost all the havoc that’s been caused by myself and friends. This should give everyone a fairly clear view of how much of a burden on society I really am. And Oregon an idea of what to expect to ensue for the next decade or so. I’m only including Alton-area incidents from the past seven years, even though my assult on the area goes back several decades to include horrible things I did as a kid, the cat shit in a purse incident, the Dino Allsman incident, looting Wood River’s 7-Eleven, etc. Most of the things listed here, hard-core visitors will remember. But quite a bit of it has never been published until now.
UFO Scares: In the early 2000′s I decided that a UFO scare would be a good way to stir up the Alton residents and possibly make the newspapers. My first attempt at creating fake UFO sightings involved glow sticks and helium balloons. It took just 6 balloons to carry a bright glow stick into the sky. But it didn’t really linger there too long and it was completely out of sight within 15 minutes. It’s unlikely anyone noticed. A 2nd attempt with a glowstick produced equally disappointing results. A 3rd attempt was made when RijilV was visiting and we tried to make hot air balloons out of candles and plastic bags. Our plastic bags were too heavy so we didn’t managed to launch anything very high. RijilV left town before we ever got around to making a 4th attempt with the proper size of plastic bags. Even though my UFO scare attempt was a complete failure, I’m listing it anyway.
McDonald’s Sign: This incident has become one of the most visited pages on the site – one day I noticed a sign in McDonald’s parking lot that could use a little spicing up. I produced my own professional-looking sign with some suggestive wording on it. And a few months later, I did another one and topped off the whole thing with a prank call to the manager who wasn’t amused.
Soda Cup on the Car: This one was pretty simple and juvenile – EvilCal and I lined the bottom of a Hardee’s soda cup with magnets, stuck it to the top of my Dodge Shadow and then drove around populated areas, laughing hysterically at all the people who tried to tell us that we left our soda on the car.
Eastgate Cinema: In 2003, my brother and I went to see The Matrix 2 on opening weekend at Eastgate. Murd0c knew I was going to see it. So 45 minutes into the movie the projector shuts down, the lights come on and a theater employee starts yelling that there’s an emergency phone call for Brad Carter. It turns out that Murd0c and a few others on the PLA voice bridge, impersonated state police and talked the theater manager into shutting off The Matrix 2 on both screens on opening weekend just to have me paged. That was some impressive social engineering – making a full house of 2 screens (probably at least 500 seats filled) unhappy all at once. It’s hard to feel guilty about this since The Matrix 2 sucked so bad.
Another incident at Eastgate Cinema was when we managed to change the movie recording line’s outgoing greeting to a bunch of porno titles. Murd0c and I called up the theater and convinced them to tell us the brand of their answering machine and the secret code on the machine that allowed us to change the greeting. The new porno greeting lasted most of the afternoon and evening, then they completely removed the machine for a few days until they could buy a new one. A year later, an assistant manager of the theater emailed me and seemed to be amused by the incident. She said there was a large “incident report” filed about the porno greeting which included portions of my website. She claimed she would get me a copy of the report but she never came through with it. I have no idea how Eastgate knew that I was responsible – the lady that emailed me also knew that I was responsible for the McDonald’s sign.
Wendy’s Spelling Bee: My brother noticed an obvious misspelling on the Alton Wendy’s sign and decided to call me about it. Amy and I immediately went to work with making prank calls to the Wendy’s employees. We convinced an employee that we were with a radio station and doing a spelling game. When the employee spelled the word right, we told her she was wrong, argued with her about it and then referred her to the sign outside to prove ourselves right. The next day, the sign was changed.
Target’s Walkie Talkies: A year or so before moving to Alton, Colleen and I acquired some walkie talkies from a Target store in Oregon. After screwing with the Oregon Target a few times, the walkie talkies ended up unused for years. We were happy to find, after moving to Alton, that the Alton Target store used the exact same two frequencies and PL tones on their walkie talkies that the Oregon store did. Evilcal and I spent a few day/nights talking to the employees, requesting bizarre price checks and generally causing all kinds of store manager unhappiness. This kept up for much of a year until I finally fried two of the walkie talkies by giving them too much power and giving the other one away to PhusionByte. Several years later, RijilV and his friend caused similar confusion at the Alton Target for a few days with their Yaesu radios.
Happy Birthday at Hardees: EvilCal and I drove around town putting signs on fast food drive-thru boards, encouraging customers to do silly things. We listened to the results on a police scanner, while videotaping the fun. The Hardees video encourages Hardees customers to sing Happy Birthday for a free meal, resulting in some very nice off-key singing.
Taco Bell Takeover: Using Yaesu radios, my friends were able to assume control of a local Taco Bell’s drive-thru. Instead of talking to the employees inside the store, they ended up talking to us. And they sure didn’t like it when “the employees” told them they were too fat to order so much food. At one point, we even videotaped the manager of Taco Bell coming out to our car to explain all the drive-thru craziness to us, then an employee talking to us about the strange drive-thru problems.
Elephant & Bird: This started out as boredom and quickly turned into a fun little project. It’s a puppet show, done with green screens about phone fraud. It includes scenes from several locations around the Alton area, such as the upper Alton post office, the Wood River Radio Shack and a downtown Alton pay phone. In the end, the phone fraudster puppets get thrown into Alton’s jail. Oddly enough, we didn’t annoy any local residents with this project.
Drive-Thru Shenanigans: Amy and Tami call me up late one night and talk me into going out with them to mess with fast food drive-thrus. We take the Happy Birthday incident a little further this time to include telling bad jokes and singing any song the customer wants.
What’s Your Bid?: The users on the PLA Forums came up with the idea of “Phone Mobbing” where we would all call into certain phone numbers for various purposes. Our second mob was organized by me – I got a bunch of forum members and site visitors to call into WBGZ’s Saturday call-in show called What’s Your Bid. Our goal was to say the word “cactus” as often as possible. But this quickly escalated into saying lots of cuss words on the air. Lots of hilarity ensued that morning and the host of the show summed it up as being an “hour of foolishness.”
Alton Online: I think the idea of an Alton area web site started out as being somewhat legitimate. I even published a paper newsletter for about a year that was distributed in local computer stores, grocery stores and libraries. But at some point, I turned the entire thing into a huge parody of Alton with fake news stories and fairly amusing images from around the area. The site still exists of this writing, with all of the old content intact.
Rusty at Winair: My friend Amy frequently called businesses I was at and harassed the employees so that I could be amused at their reactions. One day, while in an air conditioning shop, she calls up the Rusty the owner of the store and says a bunch of random silliness to him while I stand there waiting in line, listening and snapping pictures of him on the phone with my camera phone. After the call ends, Rusty tells us all how insane it was. Then more customers come in and he tells them how insane it was. I go in a day or 2 later and he’s still talking about it! Days after that, we prank him again and we use a caller ID spoofing service to make the prank call appear to come from his own home. He’s shocked when he dials *69 only to reveal his own phone number. He immediately sends the police to his house to catch the burglars who are harassing him. We can only assume that the police must have thought he was insane. Several other similar incidents happened around town whenever I went into a place, thanks to Amy. But Rusty was one of the more memorable ones.
Remote Control TV Watch: This isn’t too impressive or creative, but it was fun enough to cause me to write a small article about. I’d purchased a watch from Radio Shack that had a built-in TV remote on it. We had lots of fun with that, changing the channels and turning off TVs in bars and restaurants around Alton. Wow, it sounds even less impressive now that I’ve written about it.
Freecycle Chaos: Being a frequent user of the Alton Freecycle group, I became annoyed with a certain user of the service. So I spoofed an email from her and posted a message to the group offering all kinds of sexual toys and pornos for free. The lady completely flipped when it happened, posting numerous emails to the group swearing that she wasn’t responsible for the posts, threatening police action, traces, etc. I posted more messages by her, she posted more rebuttals and threats. Other users on the group would tell her to shut up about it, we would post as her and lash back at them. She actually managed to get a member of the Alton Police department to sign up for the group and look around. He unsubscribed a few days later. By the time all the Freecycle chaos ended, everyone was more or less annoyed with her and she ended up disappearing from the group. The whole incident only lasted maybe a week or 2, but it sure livened the group up for awhile.
Dash for Cash: In 2003, boredom turned into police questioning when I drove to Glen Carbon, Illinois to try filming some pay phone pranks on my own. I sat in the back seat of my car with a video camera pointed at a pay phone that I was calling. My plan was to pretend to be a radio station DJ and get them to run to a location to claim some money. But I never got the chance since a policeman showed up and ruined all my fun. After they let me go, I moved on to the St. Louis riverfront where I succeeded in making a few people run to a nearby riverboat to claim nonexistant money. Me, EvilCal and his girlfriend repeated this prank in 2004 but I never got around to releasing the footage of it. I should quit being lazy and do that…
Webcam Perverts: My friend Amy was constantly bombared by local guys on Yahoo Messenger, begging her for sex. So she started giving them my address and they would show up at my house so we could watch them on the live webcam that was pointed at the front porch. A few times I answered the door, feigning confusion when they asked for Amy. I would keep a digital recorder running in my pocket just in case anything hilarious was said. But nothing truly hilarious ever happened with that.
RBCP’s Porch Show: I had a couple of security cameras pointing at my porch and I always had religious people showing up at my house, trying to pray with me or get me to go to their church. So I decided to hook up a couple of VCRs to the cameras, add an intercom and videotape myself having fun with them. Unfortunately, the religious people must have gotten wind of my plan since they stopped showing up soon after this. But I did manage to get a couple of guys from the Church of Jesus Christ on tape, admitting that they canibalize girlscouts.
Food Coloring on Pay Phones: EvilCal and I drove around Alton one day squirting food coloring on pay phones handsets, then hiding nearby with a video camera and calling them. While it seemed hilarious to make people pick up pay phones and smear food coloring on their faces, it sure didn’t produce very entertaining video.
Do you Like Paper???: EvilCal and I attend the 2003 Alton Halloween parade with a scheme to promote phonelosers.org and notla.com. We’re not sure if it worked, but EvilCal sure was great at getting the crowds all excited about receiving our advertisements. He had both kids and adults begging for them.
I Heart Satan: Long after the RBCP’s Porch Show idea was abandoned, some religious people showed up at the door, trying to give me some kind of literature. I said no thanks and they left, going down the street to spread the Word to other neighbors. Stupidly, they left their van parked right in front of my house. I searched Google for some satanic literature, planning to leave it on their windshield. I ended up finding an “I HEART Satan” t-shirt which I quickly turned into a bumper sticker. I ran out, stuck it on their bumper and snapped a picture. The thought of them, tooling around in their van all morning to spread Jesus literature while sporting a pro-satan bumper sticker is just beautiful.
The text links and other ads below help pay for our hosting and crack cocaine bills. They are probably not affiliated with PLA in any way. If you'd like your own link to appear somewhere on this page, then visit our advertising page.
Free Conference Calling
Join the other countless businesses that are saving time and money by freeing up their phone lines! Reverse Cell Phone Lookup
Run a free reverse cell phone lookup to find information on any phone number including owner information. Try the premium reverse phone lookup to find additional information on any phone number.
Having pictures coming in from Carlito as all of these tweets were happening just added to the hilarity for me and Rappy. The tweets are still continuing today and show no sign of slowing down yet. So a ton of thanks goes out to all the people who’ve given us nonstop lulz these past 48 hours.
8 Comments 
“But RBCP, I don’t have a 6.5536 MHz crystal lying around my house,” you might be whining at this point. But this isn’t true. Just about any house has several 6.5536 MHz crystals in them if you know where to look. This just happens to be the exact same crystal that you can find in electric heaters, hair dryers, electric stoves, curling irons, electric hot water heaters, irons, and toasters. These crystals are in just about any item that has heated coils and are used to control the frequency of the heating elements so that they don’t burn your house down.
During a recent stay at a very nice and very large hotel in Reno, we decided that lots of fun would happen if we could just find the frequencies to our hotel. Using information given to the maids and maintenance people has always worked out for us in the past. Eventually we got several hotel frequencies by calling up housekeeping and talking a maid out of the FCC ID on her radio. She was more than happy enough to pull the battery out of her radio and read the information to us. Using 
UFO Scares: In the early 2000′s I decided that a UFO scare would be a good way to stir up the Alton residents and possibly make the newspapers. My first attempt at creating fake UFO sightings involved glow sticks and helium balloons. It took just 6 balloons to carry a bright glow stick into the sky. But it didn’t really linger there too long and it was completely out of sight within 15 minutes. It’s unlikely anyone noticed. A 2nd attempt with a glowstick produced equally disappointing results. A 3rd attempt was made when RijilV was visiting and we tried to make hot air balloons out of candles and plastic bags. Our plastic bags were too heavy so we didn’t managed to launch anything very high. RijilV left town before we ever got around to making a 4th attempt with the proper size of plastic bags. Even though my UFO scare attempt was a complete failure, I’m listing it anyway.
Rusty at Winair: My friend Amy frequently called businesses I was at and harassed the employees so that I could be amused at their reactions. One day, while in an air conditioning shop, she calls up the Rusty the owner of the store and says a bunch of random silliness to him while I stand there waiting in line, listening and snapping pictures of him on the phone with my camera phone. After the call ends, Rusty tells us all how insane it was. Then more customers come in and he tells them how insane it was. I go in a day or 2 later and he’s still talking about it! Days after that, we prank him again and we use a caller ID spoofing service to make the prank call appear to come from his own home. He’s shocked when he dials *69 only to reveal his own phone number. He immediately sends the police to his house to catch the burglars who are harassing him. We can only assume that the police must have thought he was insane. Several other similar incidents happened around town whenever I went into a place, thanks to Amy. But Rusty was one of the more memorable ones.
