Earlier this week, on Thursday night, NotBrad messaged me on Skype and asked if I’d help him test his microphone. I should have known it was a trick because the next thing I know we’re on the air and doing pizza calls for 90 minutes. There’s some fun stuff in here, especially NotBrad’s Checkers analogy near the end. That guy is FLABERGASTED and it’s ALLLLLL Gregory’s fault!

In the beginning you hear us talking about a girl I tried to call because I dinged her car. Yes, I actually dinged a car last summer, right in the midst of all my car ding pranks. Damn karma! Also, the website we were talking about where you can work from home filling Pizza Hut orders is pizzahutishomejobs.com. Go apply and see how long you last at it! Our pranking fun in this episode begins at around 20 minutes into the 90 minutes.

In other important news – TONIGHT (Saturday, February 9th, 2013) RBCP will be on the air at around 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern, making some prank calls and kind of holding the fort down until Carlito shows up to do his weekly Madhouse Live show. It won’t be nonstop prank calls – there will be music too, but it should still be a fun couple of hours before Carlito’s show. If Carlito is late, which he ALWAYS is, then I’ll keep going until he boots me off the air. Plans tonight include lots of lube, so be listening!

You know how I never shut up about Rappy McRapperson because I love him so much? Well guess what? There is now a Rappy McRapperson Media Pack for you to download with your favorite bittorrent client! It includes all of Rappy’s albums, all of his collaboration albums, his artwork, photos, and episode of his TV show from the early 2000′s. If you’re missing any important Rappy material, then this is definitely the place to get it.

The Brad and NotBrad Pizza Show - 02-07-2013 [ 1:40:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1713)

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.

Pretty please subscribe to these PLA things: Cacti Radio Facebook, PLA Facebook, Prank Calls Facebook, Redbox and the Chilipeppers Facebook, PLA Twitter, RBCP’s Twitter, phonelosers.org (PLA Radio) RSS feed, Phone Show RSS feed, Big Beef Bueno RSS feed.

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.

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 Google search 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!

You might also enjoy our original Taco Bell Takeover video, our Happy Birthday drive-thru video and our Drive-Thru Shenanigans video.

PLA TV: Hijacking Fast Food Frequencies [ 9:12 ] Download (7995)

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:

http://www.revver.com/account/show/bwf51485/

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…

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…

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.