The PLA book has been finished for a while now and the finishing touches are going into it. Chapters are being proofread, pages formatted, covers designed and pictures added. If all goes well, the book should be available long before this year is over. The book will contain stories based on the original PLA issues, such as the Dino story, Fred Meyer, the Boulder News Frenzy, revenge and more. All of it has been rewritten for the book so you’ll only think you’re reading the same shit that you’ve been reading here for the past 16 years. There are also a few new items in the book that you hopefully haven’t heard of. For a somewhat complete chapter list, visit the PLA book page or to talk about the book project in the PLA Forums, click here.

Here’s the part where I need your help. At the beginning of each chapter, below the chapter title and before the chapter actually starts, there is a quote about the PLA. These quotes aren’t necessarily related to the content in the chapter, but they’re all about some aspect of what makes the PLA awesome or why a particular person loves the PLA. Like this one and this one. I have enough quotes for about 10 chapters, but I need about 10 more of them. Say something great or witty about the PLA and you just might make it into the book.

The first few quotes I used were from this thread on the PLA Forums, so reading that might give you an idea of what I’m looking for. You can post your quote there, or post it in the comments below. Or you can email them directly to me.

If there’s something you’d like to see in the book or you have any other ideas for it or maybe if you want to contribute some artwork or anything else, you can post your ideas here or email them to me and hopefully it won’t be too late. Keep an eye on this page, though, because the book will be here very soon. No really, I mean it this time!

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted an update about The Phone Show, so here it goes. There’s a show. It’s called The Phone Show. It’s on Cacti Radio once a week, each Tuesday, at 9pm PST. RBCP hosts along with whoever he can sucker into coming on the show with him, which most frequently includes Spessa and Linear.

Recently there have been a lot of in-studio guests, including old-school PLA’ersJammie and kcochran (and you too, Chad, I GUESS) where we talked about some PLA history, such as the birth of #rock, Spee’s lawsuit and death, the Fred Meyer pranks that kcochran just happened to hear while inside a Fred Meyer, Jim Bayless and more. The show ends with an on-air suicide. It’s a good show to listen to if you’re into all that PLA stuff. Here is a link to it.

A full archive of the show can be found at www.cactiradio.com/phoneshow/

Cacti Radio has recently been taken over by Carlito from Madhouse Live, which may or may not be a permanent situation. But the Phone Show still runs on Cacti Radio each Tuesday at 9pm PST, so start listening to us and calling in each week! Please?

UPDATE: Oh yeah…I guess I should have mentioned that the very week I make this update about The Phone Show, I’m taking a 3 week hiatus from the show because I’ll be out of town, jetting all over the planet. We’ll be back sometime in August. I was way too lazy to Tweet about my absence before last night’s show, so people were tuning in and wondering why they were hearing Madhouse Radio. Sorry, everyone!

The internet’s latest social media craze is known as Foursquare. Foursquare is an application designed for most smart phones and can be downloaded at foursquare.com. Whenever you arrive at a bar or restaurant or store, you press a button on your phone and you’re “checked in” to that location. Why would you do this? We don’t know, but apparently billions of people all over the world are really into broadcasting their locations to the public. Just look at all these check-ins below:

By going to search.twitter.com, you can type in 4sq.com and you’ll get a list of everyone on the planet that is currently checking in to someplace. You can even modify your search to include only local businesses. This is great for creepy stalkers who want to keep tabs on random pretty girls. A creepy stalker could jump in his car and speed to the pub for a chance to meet the girl of his dreams. Everywhere she goes.

Another use for Foursquare is for burglars to know when houses are empty. If @sexygirl535 is out having fun with her friends at a bar, then she’s not home, right? So quick, drive over there and break into her house! You know she doesn’t have roommates because she constantly tweets about how it sucks to live alone. A website called Please Rob Me has been set up for just this purpose.

And then there’s the PLA’s favorite pasttime – making prank calls to people. Foursquare is the perfect tool for this. In that search box up there, you click on the Twitter username which probably gives you the name of the person checking in. Then you click on the link in their post and you’ll have the phone number of the business they’re at. Now you can call the business, ask for that person and say something crazy to them. They’re almost always surprised that anyone could know that they’re there. It rarely occurs to them that just minutes ago they transmitted their location to the entire world. Listen to these:

Want to hear some more of the phone calls we’ve made to these people? Visit the PLA Forum’s latest discussion board, called Let’s Stalk People! You can listen to calls we’ve made, post your own calls, and find out how these people responded on their Twitter accounts. You’ll see links to hilarious Twitter and Facebook threads like this one:

Foursquare type applications are becoming more popular every day. Yelp.com and loopt.com have a similar service that lets you check in to places you’re visiting. A site called blippy.com lets people transmit what they’re purchasing on their credit cards in real time which could allow someone to know where they’re shopping at. You may notice other similar services showing up in your friends twitter and facebook feeds. When you see a friend check in on Foursquare, it is your duty to prank call them at that place.

The PLA is constantly raising awareness to the security and privacy issues of Foursquare by prank calling as many users as we can. Many users immediately stop using Foursquare after our calls. This is a public service to them since a simple prank call is harmless compared to what could happen to them. Help join the cause by pranking Foursquare users for the greater good! Don’t let the rapists and burglars get to them before we do!

Join us in the Let’s Stalk People! message board.

Listen to our Foursquare stalking podcast where we discuss Foursquare and play our stalking calls.

Visit www.phonelosers.org/stalker to hear even more stalking calls and view the responses of people we stalk.

The author of this post can be found on Twitter, Yelp and Foursquare.

…

Trevelyn at WeakNet Labs has been busy lately, coding up lots of new programs for the Android platform. Included are blue box and red box programs, now available for free in the Android Market. If you’ve got an Android phone, be sure to use them to make free calls from your cell phone, which will probably cause a universe-exploding paradox of some sort.

Trevelyn is also doing a weekly show on Cacti Radio called Taming The Electron. Be sure to listen to it every Sunday!

For those that don’t know, WeakNet was destroyed by a fire about a month ago, so I’m sure Trevelyn would appreciate a small donation, using the PayPal link on the bottom of his page.

Texting is illegal. And talking on your cell phone without a hands-free contraption is illegal. But you know what isn’t illegal while driving? Eating breakfast. And putting on your makeup. And opening your mail. And changing music tracks on your car stereo. And…reading a book. I’m pretty sure there’s no specific law against reading a book while driving. So I came up with an an ingenious way to fool the police officers trying to enforce this new law. Hide my cell phone in a book! I call it The Phone Book.

I used a Dremel tool to cut a hole in this book, 130 pages deep, so that my cell phone fits snugly inside of it. Now when I pass an officer, nose buried in a book, he’ll just think I’m engrossed in a gripping horror story and not actually breaking any laws by texting my BFF Jill. Here are a few pictures of the construction of this amazing project.

Cell by Stephen King. Not a bad remake of all his other stories.	Looks like it’ll fit nicely inside this book.	A pencil line trace of my iPhone.

The only downside to this project is that it’s slightly harder to control my car when driving 75 MPH around town since I have to use one hand to hold the book and the other to actually type the messages to my friends and then mostly my knee to try and keep the steering wheel straight. I’ve nearly lost control a few times, but I think it’s very unlikely that I’ll be noticed by the police. And if they do pull me over for any other offenses, my cell phone will be hidden safely in my book where he won’t even notice it.

“Were you by any chance texting while swerving all over the place back there?” he’ll ask me.

“Why no officer. Do you see a cell phone in my car?” I’ll reply.

You can click here to find out if texting and/or talking on a cell phone is illegal in your state. If it is, you just may want to invest in a Dremel and make yourself a Phone Book too. As an added bonus, you’ll have a few pages of something to read while you’re impatiently waiting for that text message back from your friend while driving.

UPDATE AND DISCLAIMER: Joseph from Kansas City emailed me this morning and informed me that carving a secret compartment into your Amazon Kindle version of Cell does not work and should not be attempted. Apparently this will completely ruin your Kindle! I’m unsure if other brands of ebooks will have similar consequences, but it’s probably best not to try if you’re not familiar with electronics. It’s also unknown if this hack will work on other paper books besides Stephen King’s Cell. I’ve only tried it on Cell, so if you ruin your copy of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer with this, don’t blame me because I only guarantee that it works on the paperback version of Cell.

And Trevelyn from WeakNet Labs has started up a new show called Taming The Electron, where he plays music and talks about coding every Sunday at 4pm PST. You can view this weeks show at the Taming The Electron page, which is at weaknetlabs.com/tamingtheelectron.

linear is also premiering a new show this week, which will air immediately after The Phone Show on Tuesday, at 10pm PST. Be sure to listen for that. And don’t forget to listen to The Phone Show tomorrow night! Between Carlito, The Phone Show and linear’s new show, it’s going to be an action-packed 5 hours.

For a complete listing of shows on the Cacti Radio Network, visit cactiradio.com/schedule

12/24 UPDATE: He made another one that’s much better…

00:00 The new phone book’s here!
00:45 Intro
01:30 Pumpkin contest winners – Congrats Handler and Matt!
02:00 Hotel intercept phone calls – Telephreak – i-hacked
08:23 Radio auction phone mob
13:46 prehack.org
14:00 Cacti Radio
14:04 Read the Manic Radio story.
14:04 Listen to the Manic Radio episode that was broadcast on 11/10/2009.
14:23 Ask Mr. Biggs, PaulDotCom, Security Justice, Nate and Di.
14:48 Black Hat Life
15:57 Leave a voicemail at 505-796-4020 or phonelosers.org on Skype. Email radio AT phonelosers.org.
16:18 Earthbound – Da Black Market OC ReMix

If you listen to this episode of PLA Radio, be sure and watch the accompanying video below! It has footage of us pranking the hotel at Defcon, a 5 minute clip of the PLA forum members sitting around a table in a conference room while making the calls to the radio station auction and some clips of me recording this episode of PLA Radio. Plus an awesome surprise at the end!

And speaking of The Phone Show, it’s on tonight at 9:00pm Pacific. Listen to it on Cacti Radio.

And one last thing…Mr. Anderson has announced a phone mob for Wednesday at 9:00am Central Time. If you can drag yourself out of bed that early, tune into Cacti Radio or watch the PLA Twitter for instructions.

The Phone Show lasted only a single night on Manic Radio last week, then RBCP was “fired” 2 days later. Manic Radio didn’t appreciate our hilarious material at all and you can read a little about all that here. So this time, instead of moving to a new station, despite offers from klulz and Radio Xenu (thanks, guys!), we’re just going to set up our own streaming server which will feature nonstop PLA material 24 hours a day. Take a listen at the links below!

Several people on the PLA Forums have expressed interest in doing their own shows on our station, so keep an eye on it for new shows and material soon. We’ll be setting up a page or a domain for the station once we figure out what the hell to call it. This week The Phone Show will be on at 9pm Pacific, Tuesday night, on the new station. Join us on efnet’s #phonelosers by going to our new chat room page at phonelosers.org/chat/ during the show. Unlike Manic Radio’s chat, you’re much less likely to be kicked out for being clever or funny.

Join RBCP, linear, Spessa and whoever else decides to call in every Tuesday night to talk about important political issues like pie. It starts this week, so be listening tomorrow! Until then, there’s Manic Radio on Facebook, Manic Radio on Myspace and Manic Radio is even on the internet now! Go listen to some 80′s music on their 90′s looking website.

Here’s an entry by t0rx:

Here’s some minimal effort by Matt E:

A pay phone by Interrupt Handler:

Interrupt Handler attempting to outdo Altalp’s PLA entry from last year:

Skunkworks RBCP face transfer pumpkin, done using this method:

Matt and Janet’s entry:

David’s entry:

Matt and Janet from Arizona sent in these amazing PLA pumpkins today. Nice! There’s only a few days left for the PLA pumpkin carving contest, so get your submissions sent to brad at phonelosers dot org ASAP!

And this is completely unrelated to the pumpkin carving contest, but here’s some really cool PLA Radio art work, sent to us by Phrank from the PLA Forums.

You can click on the PLA Radio image to see more of Phrank’s artwork. Thanks, Phrank! Oh and if any of you agree with the sentiment of loving Trevelyn’s mom, you should join the Facebook group about it.

The first is by RBCP, who is disqualified from the contest for being an employee of PLA. The 2nd is from David in California. So David is in the lead! Keep David from winning a PLA shirt by sending in your own submissions before November 1st. HURRY!

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???

Carve a PLA-themed pumpkin this year and you can win amazing prizes, such as this guy wearing a PLA t-shirt!

You can either carve your pumpkin or do something artistic on it using paints or Sharpies. All entries must have something to do with the PLA, such as a carving of Curtis Lee Jones, a PLA logo, The Phone Show, RBCP’s wiener, etc. Take a picture of your pumpkin and email it to BRAD at phonelosers.org. Entries will be posted on the contest page and winners will be decided during the first week of November. The deadline for your entry is October 31st, 2009. All entries will get a PLA sticker, even if it completely sucks.

00:00 Mildred Monday calls in
00:47 Intro by Trevelyn
01:48 Listen to PaulDotCom
02:07 New YouTube video – pay phone prank. Also, watch our new 7-Eleven video.
02:31 The Phone Show on Party934.com
02:57 The Phone Show RSS feed is www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow.xml
03:00 New PLA voice bridge number – 712-338-8730 extension 752
05:28 PLA’s hotel pranks
05:40 Sandy Chapin – her Last.fm station
09:40 Voicemails – 505-496-4020
10:16 PLA Songs and RBCP’s music page. Also visit the Redbox and the Chilipeppers Myspace page.
12:07 Wacky Morning DJ episode
13:22 News article on Kevin Mitnick
15:07 The Lazlow Show
19:50 PrankNET article on The Smoking Gun
29:05 phonelosers.org/hotel/
29:15 PLA Forums
29:50 PLA on Facebook
29:24 PLA on Myspace
29:25 PLA on YouTube
31:09 Read PLA Issue #33
31:36 Bell Odyssey by Rob T. Firefly

Some guy named Casey tweeted this picture to us. Not sure if he made it, but thanks Casey! Speaking of Twitter, you should all be following the PLA on Twitter. Links to it all is over there in the side bar.

In other news, a new video was released on PLA’s YouTube account, and promptly removed for TOS. So now it’s on our PhotoBucket account. Let’s see how long it lasts there. This video is based on the old PLA issue about 7-Eleven. View it below:

AND ONE LAST THING – The Phone Show didn’t happen tonight because of some server issues over at Party 934, but we should be back next week with a new show and to take your calls on the air. I did finally update the Phone Show’s RSS feed with last week’s show, though, so check your iTunes or go visit The Phone Show’s page to listen to the latest shows.

You can click here to talk about Trevelyn’s game in the PLA Forums, or go to weaknetlabs.com to download this game.

• RBCP’s review
  
• The Phone Show Defcon Wrapup – 8/3/2009
  
• Rogueclown’s review

Also, so I don’t have to put in the effort to make a whole other post about this, check out the new Smoking Gun story about Dex because it’s a really interesting read.

DEFCON 17 will be held July 31 – August 2, 2009, at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Will you be there? A few of us PLA Forum regulars will be, including RogueClown, Rob T. Firefly, notlist3d, RijilV and RBCP. The official PLA Twitter probably won’t be updated too much, but you can follow us around at these Twitters:

Rogue Clown: twitter.com/rogueclown
Rob T. Firefly: twitter.com/rob_t_firefly
RBCP: twitter.com/rbcp

RBCP will be hanging around somewhere during the Podcasters Meetup, so be sure to attend that and say hello. Also, take a look at our Defcon planning thread for more information. See everyone there!

Earlier this month there was a lot of mainstream media coverage (The Smoking Gun, NBC, The Cabin, MSNBC, KOAT and most importantly, FARK) of what appears to be another PrankNet prank call to a hotel, just like we wrote about earlier this year. Only this time the pranksters convinced the hotel front desk clerk to pull the fire alarm, set off sprinklers and bust out all the windows in the lobby. Damages are estimated at $50,000.

Pulling fire alarms, setting off sprinklers and breaking windows are all popular activities with the people who run PrankNet. I sat in on one of their nightly prank call shows a few weeks ago and heard nothing but pranks to hotels, most of them involving sprinklers going off in guests’ faces while on the phone, making me laugh hysterically while feeling guilty for laughing hysterically.

This recent followup article from thecabin.net interviews a Tennessee woman who claims to know the true identity of Dex, who is the man behind a lot of the calls on PrankNET. She admits to being a former fan of Dex, but doesn’t like the harmful pranks that they’re pulling these days. Within a day of this article, PrankNET posted a prank call which is apparently by the same woman doing the same kind of prank call.

Also this month, another fast food restaurant was hit by a prank call similar to PrankNET’s KFC prank from earlier this year. Police arrived to find male employees standing outside in nothing but their underwear after setting off the kitchen’s fire suppression system inside. The employees had also broken out all of the restaurant’s windows to help ventilate the building. You can read more about that story at www.koat.com.

Visit the PLA Forums to discuss the Whataburger prank, the hotel pranks, and other PrankNET pranks.

00:00 Intro with Purple PLA
05:45 Spessa calls in
08:00 MUSIC: Mexican Wine by Fountains of Wayne
08:45 Microphone issues
09:10 MUSIC: Car Phone
10:06 Microphone issues are fixed and Flamoot calls in
13:23 MUSIC: As by Har Mar Superstar
13:37 Someone calls in about a Craigslist ad
15:40 John calls in
18:51 A lady calls in about a free car
20:15 PLARADIONUMBERONEFAN calls in to ask about VoIP and to plug Hooter and Greenway
25:20 We call a crazy lady
28:34 linear tries to collect a debt
40:47 MUSIC: Macarron Chacarrom by El Mudo

I’m entirely too lazy to put any show notes up this week. You’ll just have to figure everything out yourself.

Do you hate that The Phone Show is on the PLA Radio feed? Do you love it? Have you ever had an opinion in your life? You can vote about this issue in the PLA Forums and let us know what you think. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to put the Phone Show on this feed or not, so give me some advice.

Visit Party 934 for other shows that are absolutely nothing like The Phone Show!

Since I’ve never had a need for TWO microphones in the studio, I was a little unprepared for the issues that would cause so you’ll notice some issues with the sound quality at times. Sorry about that. Below is a buttload of shownotes:

0:00:00 Intro
0:01:16 MUSIC: Pennsylvania by The Bloodhound Gang
0:01:30 Kikeburner calls in with a loving message for all. (Sorry, about our microphones here.)
0:02:19 MUSIC: Sometimes I Wonder by Throwing Toasters
0:05:05 Brad’s microphone sucks for some reason
0:05:57 MUSIC: Rap To World by Ill Mitch
0:08:44 RBCP attempts to discover Spessa’s PLA origins
0:09:40 Spessa unwraps a piece of gum right in front of the goddamn condenser microphone
0:10:34 Spessa, Mr. Spessa and RBCP answer the phone at a hotel (click here for more of these calls)
0:16:06 Mister Magoo/Anderson/Dave calls in to tell us the stream sucks
0:19:10 MUSIC: Holland, 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel
0:19:22 MUSIC: Drunken Lament by Ludo
0:19:41 Flamoot assaults us with crazy PBX stuff (visit his Google group!)
0:22:38 Eljefe calls about a motorcycle
0:23:18 Joe calls to request nerdcore
0:26:54 MUSIC: Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo by The Bloodhound Gang
0:28:58 Chatting with Spessa
0:30:50 www.phonelosers.org/tannest/ for the Tannest page
0:30:58 Boulder News Frenzy
0:31:25 Richard Cardo’s murder accusations
0:31:52 Prank call to directory assistance
0:33:03 Alex Carbon didn’t order a calling card
0:34:32 MUSIC: In The Garage by Weezer
0:35:44 Some pizza prank calls by Spessa (click here for lots more of these calls)
0:38:20 MUSIC: Hurt Feelings by The Flight of the Conchords
0:40:00 Rob T. Firefly
0:41:33 Listen to Deter at www.phonelosers.org/songs/
0:41:48 View RTF’s contest entry
0:43:55 www.phonelosers.org/community/
0:45:54 MUSIC: Get Back by Zebrahead
0:46:48 Go to Defcon!
0:47:19 Eljefe tries to sell Alex Carbon a calling card
0:47:31 MUSIC: Mah Na Mah Na by The Muppet Show
0:48:11 Visit Sign Hacker to see some of Spessa’s craaaazy antics.

I’m considering putting all episodes of The Phone Show on the PLA Radio feed and just combining it into one single feed. How do you feel about this? Click here to voice your opinion on it. If you want to listen to older Phone Show episodes, view the archive.

What child or adolescent hasn’t, at one time or another, made or been tempted to make a prank phone call? The reactions of the victims are priceless. People get a kick out of hearing the frustrations of others and laughing at their stupidity. It is sick humor, but god is it funny.

I know I began prank calling when I was nine. A few friends of mine were sitting around, bored, and decided to just call random numbers from the telephone book and say things like “Is your refrigerator running? You should go get it!” and hang up, often to nervous to stay on the line and hear their response, but laughing just the same. This fun ended though when a few days later a man did a *69 and my father picked up. Needless to say, I was almost deaf from the screaming when my father was done with me.

I fondly remembered my prank calling days, but I was only able to relive them when I met a group called the PLA (The Phone Losers of America) on the internet. Not only were they hilarious with their over the phone antics, but they also knew how to screw over the telephone company and make it so that they would never get caught. It was a dream come true for me. From then on, my friend Zak would give me a call and then three-way it to a prank call, or I would go on illegal (meaning free!!) party lines with my friends and harass telephone operators. It was the best.

It then came to a point where I felt the need to see why I got such a kick out of this. I as having all this fun, but I’m a nice person! I noticed that all the PLA guys were really sweet and not the delinquents that they portrayed in their phone calls. Why were we so rotton?

Then I realized what a power trip it was. There Zak and I were, two 16 year old kids having the power to control the emotions of unsuspecting adults and people we didn’t like. I remember at one point we called my French neighbor who lives 4 houses away from me and had Zak scream “Viva la Revolucion!!” until she said, “Szhoo ahhre vaary seeke people!!” and hung up on us. We died laughing. This was a lady that no more than a few minutes beforehand had been my elder, a woman I was forced to respect. Now she was my prey. I had control over her temper. It was an ego boost.

For years, kids like Zak and I are told that we should obey our parents, respect others, and follow the rules. The teenage years are often very confusing for adolescents because they are trapped in this world where they are still too young to be considered adults and too old to be considered children. We are told to “act our age,” but yet our age doesn’t have a way to act. We are the in between-ers. Should we go hang out with our friends or get a job? There are all these decisions that teenagers are faced with that still will not let society call them adults or children. Prank calling was a way for Zak and I to let out these frustrations. We took matters into our own hands and decided to have the power to drive adults insane in a very childish, but complex manner.

The PLA wasn’t like my nine-year old days when a simple *69 could destroy my cover. Screwing over the telephone company and harassing people without getting caught actually took a lot of work. It required a lot of knowledge about phone, the way the telephone company is set up, and what precautions should be taken so that we wouldn’t get caught. It makes one feel almost superior when they can figure out how to rip off a major phone company or long distance carrier. RedBoxChilliPepper, at that time the president of the PLA, wrote issues and issues of e-zines citing hundreds of different ways to get one over on the phone companies and drive people crazy without getting in trouble for it. I learned how to use a red box (A device that imitates the noises made by pay phone when money is inserted. This makes the pay phone think that it is being given money, hence, free calls!!) and for a time even got my own free 1-800 number. I was saving money and was sneaky enough not to get busted.

I also felt important being part of a group that did this. I was never in the PLA, but since I was friends with almost all of them, they would include me in a lot of their pranks, or give me useable credit card or phone card numbers to call them. It really brought a group like us together. We were all nice kids, just a little bit odd. We were the nerds and computer geeks (especially if you consider that we met over the computer) that could get together and get back at all the people and establishments that pissed us off. It was a bonding experience.

Before I found the PLA in a chat room of mine that got taken over by them, I was a lonely kid. I was “different” and not accepted into the “cool” crowd because of the way I was. I wasn’t into my looks or materialistic like many of my peers were. When the PLA came into my life, it was almost like a calling. These were my people. They were quirky and not quite liked in their towns either. Alone, we were nobodies, but united, we were practically unstoppable. With all our free time alone, we learned how to do things that the average snotty teenager would never dream of. I finally belonged somewhere. I was not alone. Despite what we did, I felt good knowing that I was a part of something. This feeling was the basis for the PLA.

The PLA, much like the chat rooms that we met each other in, also allowed its members to hide under an alias. No one ever used their real name. I was “jammie,” Zak (which is still not even his real name) was “el_jefe,” and there was RedBoxChilliPepper, Colleen Card… and just so many other strange names of the people who were in or associated with the PLA. When we had these names, we were all unidentifiable with the people we were previously. We could be completely different personalities with these names for ourselves. It was a way of letting out our crazy sides. These were the sides of us that we were always told by our peers and elders were “bad” and “wrong.” We were different, and with these new names we were allowed to show it by being someone that the people we knew would not have expected from us. We could even make our name express something about ourselves. My “jammie” name had to do with my passion for Pearl Jam. “El_Jefe” came from Zak’s silly way of saying that he was the boss.

Many of us perhaps wanted a new name to, in a way, take a vacation from our own lives. We were all kids dealing with the usual problems of life, but also having to deal with the fact that many people considered us uncool or different. We were the outcasts. In using our different names, we could be whoever or however we wanted to be, and not have to worry about the people we knew in real life looking down on us for it. In fact, our phone mayhem allowed us to, in some twisted way, take our revenge on the people who would piss us off or treat us badly. Phones were our domain, and god help the person that messed with us. Instead of being deemed unworthy by our peers, with our phone phreaking and new names, we were allowed to deem the people unworthy and drive them crazy because of it.

It was a definite god-like feeling the others and I got when we managed to harass someone to the point of even changing their number. Either RedBox or Zak called up Glen Danzig from the famous band Danzig and said “Sir, you have a collect call from hell. Will you accept the charges?” He changed his number the next day. That is definite power. It is also power when you know enough about phones and getting around the system to shut off a person’s plumbing, electricity, gas, and have them declared legally dead even though they are walking around totally helpless to the things going on around them.

Now, I would feel sorry for the people that were the victims, but most of the time they brought the harassment to themselves. Most of the people that became PLA victims would start off by mistreating one of the PLA members, not knowing what they were capable of. The PLA was pretty much created for the purpose of getting back at these people. Prank calling is a way of getting back at the people that put you down for no reason. In the PLA, the outcasts united and were able to choose their victims from the wide variety of people that insisted on trying to make their lives hell for their own amusement. Because of the PLA, the bullies would get bullied for once.

An example of this would be when the girlfriend of my best internet friend, vel0city, came online and started bad-mouthing me for no reason. She would say that I was obsessed with him, and that she didn’t like me because he would talk to me so much. The PLA took care of me and called up her house. She was almost at the point of tears when they were done because they made her get in trouble with her mother. Still, it didn’t matter what they did. The damage was done. I felt so hurt that she could think these horrible things of me simple because I was a good friend with her boyfriend.

The PLA seem almost nice in comparison to many of its victims. At least the frustration that the PLA would bring to these bullies was harmless. The victims could hang up their phones and forget about it. Unfortunately, the people behind the PLA had to deal with these insults that didn’t go away as easily. Despite the aliases and the power of the organization, the PLA and its friends were all just human beings capable of being hurt.

I can even recall back when I first met the PLA. I thought they were a bunch of mean morons, and told them so. I was kick-banned from my internet channel for days afterward. Eventually I got frustrated and gave up. I decided to try being nice to them for a change. They were mean to me, but not malicious. I actually even found them quite funny. Eventually they saw that I was a nice person and I saw the same in them. I was no longer a target for them once they realized I didn’t deserve it.

It’s sad when one thinks that the only way for the outcasts to defend themselves from society is to do malicious things like the PLA does. It is a lot of fun, but in the end I think we all realize that it does hurt people. I’m sure we all wish that there was no reason to have to start an organization based on revenge. This though, is unfortunately how the world works. If people are different or do not follow the norm, they are ostracized and looked down upon. Teenage years are especially difficult for this reason. We don’t know who we should be or what we should do.

Even so, I must say that my experience as a good friend of the PLA’s has been a lot of fun. It is just easier to sleep at night knowing that if I ever had a serious problem with someone, that they could help me. They are like the big brothers I have never had, and the friends that in this harsh society of materialistic and trendy people, I could never have found anywhere else. I couldn’t have been luckier or had more fun.

Works Cited
1. http://www.cuervocon.org
2. http://www.phoneloser.org
3. interviews with “dhate” from #cuervoradio on IRC.

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.

So far the Defcon 2009 PLA attendee list includes RogueClown, notlist3d, RijilV and RBCP. Are you planning to go? Take a look at our Defcon planning thread in the forums and let us know if you can make it too. You might want to arrange some ride and room sharing there too.

DEFCON 17 will be held July 31 – August 2, 2009, at the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Defcon is a fun environment for all ages where you can make explosives, trash hotel rooms, stab hookers and drink until you die of alcohol poisoning. See you all there!

Last night was The Phone Show, which airs each week at 11pm – 12pm PST on Party 934 and on 102.5 FM in some unknown area of New York. linear is usually around to cohost, and other random people show up too, such as murd0c last night and altalp who cohosted last week. We play music and prank calls, do interviews, take live phone calls and I complain about Skype a lot.

In order to keep the main page of phonelosers.org from turning into nothing but The Phone Show, I’m going to announce the show maybe just once a month or so. So this is the announcement for April. Listen to The Phone Show! Here are links to the last few shows:

04-20-2009: linear and murdoc cohost tonight as we take calls, attempt to interview a world-famous investigator and play music. There are between 15 and 19 online listeners throughout the show.

04-13-2009: linear is unable to host this week, so altalp joins RBCP in about 90 minutes of music, pranks and phone calls from listeners. We also do an impromptu interview with the Twitter worm creator that was in the news so much last week.

04-06-2009: Callers force linear to contemplate suicide in this episode and RBCP repeatedly has to cut to music while he talks linear away from the ledge. Nothing is prepared for this show, as usual, so we just take a lot of calls.

You can view the complete show notes from each episode at www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow/ and you can now subscribe to the podcast version of The Phone Show at http://www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow.xml

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.

This video is for informational purposes only! Do not actually attempt to use this code to empty out coin boxes. Now that this information is in the public eye again, we hope the phone companies will use a little common sense and change the codes again like they did in 1995. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Be sure to watch our other videos at www.youtube.com/user/phonelosersofamerica too!

Also this week, I replenished the supply of black PLA t-shirts since they we running low. And while I was at it, I threw a few extra colors in there too. Purple, because I know you hacker types love wearing purple because it makes you look so fabulous. Some kind of reddish color called “cedar” and a hippie-looking green color named Olive. Here’s a picture:

Those 3 new colors are in very limited supply and only available in Large and Extra Large. Black shirts are available in all sizes. Visit the PLA Store to order a shirt. Be sure to put a note on the PayPal order form that you want one of the other colors, otherwise you’ll receive a black shirt.

00:00 Fading in with Ants by Dr. Octagon
00:10 Introducing your wacky morning DJs, one which is distorted because he’s yelling too loud.
02:30 Music: linear by rbcp
09:00 Tombstone calls in to plug the forums at pla.comoj.com/forum
10:58 Brad gets a call from a Sheriff
12:35 Twitter is popular with old people now
13:19 Music: Blackalicious – Deception
14:22 Are we really on FM radio?
16:00 Godot calls in and we find out the T is silent and that he really was at Shmoocon
20:10 Brad promotes The Phone Show to Hudson Valley listeners
24:00 Music for Rushpwnsx: The Trees by Rush
24:15 Music: The Vandals – My Girlfriend’s Dead
26:48 yeti7 calls in fucked up on vicodin
29:00 Live calls to potential Hudson Valley listeners
31:50 Brad epically fails at Skype
32:00 Music: Still Alive by Jonathan Coulton (robot version)
32:56 Music: Tunak Tunak by Daler Mehndi
37:08 Tanner calls in to suggestion PLA Radio ideas
39:12 linear manages to get a plug in for www.phonelosers.net
40:21 Music dedicated to Mildred Monday: It Is Pitch Dark by MC Frontalot
44:35 Mildred Mondady calls in
47:28 Angelina, a hooker from Florida calls us
51:00 Big Love by Fleetwood Mac

For more information on The Phone Show, visit www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow. You can listen live each Tuesday morning at 2am EST on Party934.com.

As mentioned in the most recent episode of PLA Radio, RBCP is doing a weekly hour-long show on Party 934 called The Phone Show. It’s on each Tuesday morning at 2am Eastern time. Listen each week for live phone calls, music and whatever else we feel like doing for an hour. Visit www.phonelosers.org/phoneshow for more information on the show.

After throwing a few things out his window, the caller was instructed to pull the hotel’s fire alarm, which he did. Because, you know, the front desk person can’t pull a fire alarm by themselves. They need the help of sleepy guests in the middle of the night.

“The poor guy in the room is, of course, feeling pretty bashful and somewhat stupid, but he’s not going to be held liable or anything,” David Goold, the hotel’s night attendant, told CBC News early Monday morning.

“He can’t really be blamed for what you’re doing, half-awake, under the front desk’s supposed instructions, which is who the people on the phone said they were.”

You heard it, folks, it’s okay to throw large items out of your hotel room window as long as you claim it was a prank caller that made you do it. The time to live like a rock star is now!

For those of you who listen to PLA Radio, you might recall episode #23 where we played the calls from a KFC hoax in which a prank caller convinced employees to set off fire extinguishers, strip completely nude outside, and pee on each other. According to the comments on CBC News, the same man is responsible for this prank call.

The most impressive part of all of this, though, is that Allison Devereaux, the writer of the article at CBC News, was able to use the word defenestrated in her story. According to dictionary.com, defenestrate is a verb meaning, “To throw out of a window.” Allison was finally able to mark this word off her long list of words that she really wants to use in an article someday. Congratulations, Allison!

While I can’t help but see the hilarity in both of these prank call incidents, it’s still a terrible idea to involve emergency services when making prank calls. For those of you wanting to making similar prank calls, do it without causing panic or involving police and fire. I get the feeling that this prank caller is going to take it too far and end up causing some serious injury or death. And while “death by prank call” makes me giggle, I’d still hate to see someone have a TV land on them while innocently walking past a hotel.

To see just how easy it is to fool hotel guests by calling their rooms and claiming to be from the front desk, click here for our hotel prank calls.

Read the original story on cbc.ca

Discuss this story in the PLA Forums

00:00 The Word on the street (click it, there’s a whole cactus-themed video! Thanks CerealKiller!)
00:25 Intro
01:06 www.youtube.com/prankycallz
01:25 The Phone Show on Party 934
01:46 I Got No Iphone by Perry Grip
02:19 New phone mob
13:08 PLA Forums
13:11 prehack.org
13:15 Voicemails – 505-796-4020
16:58 Pay phone stuffing (pics are here and here)
21:30 www.youtube.com/phonelosersofamerica
21:48 I’ve Got Some Falling To Do – by Lemon Demon.

I searched all over Google for some good pay phone stuffing (also known as pay phone jamming, apparently) stories or information and could find pretty much nothing on the topic. I’ve always seen it mentioned in passing in history books on telephone companies and in underground ezines, but it seems like there hasn’t been a really good writeup on the topic anywhere. Am I missing it somewhere? If you know of a website (or a book or video or anything else) on the topic of pay phone stuffing, post it in the comments!

00:00 Cactus Flight 1529
00:46 Intro
01:19 Hi Richard
01:50 ShmooCon Happened
02:29 Cold War Kids – Something Is Not Right With Me
02:40 PLA Radio Episode #17 – Voice Authentication
03:15 Bell Canada assurances
05:22 Enrolling in voice authentication
09:57 Richard Cardo interpretive music and dance, based on Colleen Card’s poetry.
10:33 Rob T. Firefly
10:42 Extreme cases of phone pranking
10:58 El Jefe prank call stolen from hektik.com without permission
12:30 Upgrading keyboards at Wal-Mart
14:22 Upgrading keyboards at Motel 6
14:42 KFC hoax call
27:35 Richard Cardo’s YouTube
27:50 Molly Lewis – My Hope
30:38 I don’t speak a word of English

Thanks, Veruca, for pointing us to Generation Zel!, which is where the KFC sound file was located. You can read posts on that site related to the KFC incident here, here, here and here.

Pre-order Richard Cardo’s new book or buy his old one from Amazon.com!

AND

1, 2, 3, 4,
A phreak is knocking at my door.
5, 6, 7, 8,
His lineman’s belt is on him straight.
9, 10, 11, 12,
He’s putting phone wires under my shelf
5, 6, 7, 8,
I do not wish to be harassed by the PLA.
PLA ROCKS!

On the last 2 episodes, I’ve run a little short on time (I really prefer to keep shows under 30 minutes) so I didn’t play any voicemails. I still listen to all the voicemails and will play the least suckiest of them on future shows. So call in your comments to (505) 796-4020 or leave a comment on our contact page.

This episode of PLA Radio features nothing but an interview with one of the 976-GIRLS prank callers, named Erika. Even if you don’t know who the 976-GIRLS are, you might find the techniques and their very businesslike approach to prank calls interesting. D.I.L.L.I.G.A.F. Records is also known for bringing us The Ball Busters and Telephone Head.

If you want to learn more about the 976-GIRLS and their one CD called Phonephuct, you can take a look at PLA’s 976-GIRLS page. Or if you want to buy a new 976-GIRLS CD from Amazon, they only cost $165! A complete bargain! Click here to get that. (Or used copies for a much more reasonable amount.)

it was a year ago today when i stumbled across phone losers of america.

the way i found it was random enough: i was bored one night, and clicking my way through wikipedia. one of the random articles i stumbled across had something to do with telecom, and one of the links on that article pointed to the wikipedia page on phone phreaking. i had no idea what phone phreaking was, but had been idly wondering ever since i read jonathan lee riches ©’s brilliant lawsuit against 50 cent. in that lawsuit, jlr© claims that old fitty stole his lyric, “a phone phreaker, comin out your home speakerz.” so, i clicked the link, read about what a phone phreaker was, and saw the links at the end. one of them was to phone losers, i clicked on the link, and i was up until 4am the next morning listening to prank calls on the site. i blogged it the next morning, and then stayed up absurdly late the next night listening to even more of the calls and reading the content on the site.

Click here to read the rest of Rogue’s entry. Click here to read other stories of people who found the PLA. And be sure to tell us your story in the comments or in the forums. It’s been nice having you around here this past year, Rogue!

Recently a guy named Matthew had a birthday and requested a PLA cake. He didn’t realize, however, that we take copyright law very seriously around here and will be suing him for any and all birthday gifts he has received, plus attorney fees. See you in court, Matt!

(Click here to view even more cake images from Mattew’s site.)

vixen, altalp, i-ball, RTF and RogueClown hiding behind him.

This weekend a bunch of PLA Forums people made it to the annual ShmooCon hacker convention in Washington D.C. There were a lot of other people there too, but who cares about all them. Lots of thanks to everyone who showed up and said hello to us. We only caught the very end of the Podcaster’s Meetup, but still managed to see a lot of people at the HacDC party.

Trevelyn and i-ball, in front of our room’s door

Great times were had, childish stunts were pulled, fun people were met and nobody got arrested or beat up! I’ll do a more detailed writeup of the weekend’s events on my homepage later this evening and I’ll put a lot more pictures on my Flickr account. Also, keep an eye out on the PLA’s YouTube for some ShmooCon video to show up soon. Thanks again, everyone!

RBCP, i-ball, Trevelyn and Altalp tie up the real registration people and throw them in a closet.

Links:
RBCP’s ShmooCon Review
RBCP’s ShmooCon Photos
RogueClown’s Review
RogueClown’s Photos
RTF’s Shmoo Revue
Video of sneaking into Shmoo and exploring the basement
Denial of service attack on Shmoo

Just one last quick reminder – if you’re going to be at ShmooCon this weekend, look us up. Quite a few people from the PLA Forums will be attending, including RTF, Trevelyn, Rogue Clown, RBCP, tully, vixen and Magus.

If you want to discuss this event, here’s our official planning thread on the forums. The PLA/UPL Twitter will be updated throughout the weekend with the whereabouts of the PLA group, or you can just follow some of the people who are going to be there.

Also, some of us may or may not be attending the 3rd Annual Podcaster’s Meetup on Friday evening, where you can meet the stars of your favorite podcasts like Hak5, PaulDotCom, CyberSpeak, Securabit, Security Justice, SploitCast, Unpersons, SMBMinute and maybe even those PLA Radio people. See you there!

I was confused and had no idea what he was talking about. So I did a Google search for Ian Eisenberg phonelosers.org and came up with PLA Issue #33 which mentioned his name in an article about teenagers addicted to chat lines. This is really old stuff, from mid-1995, so it’s pretty weird that this guy suddenly wants the article taken down.

It turns out that Ian Eisenberg and his dad Joel Eisenberg ran chat lines and 900-number lines back then. The article included this: “Eisenberg gained national attention in the late ’80s when he ran a TV ad encouraging kids to call Santa Claus on a 900 pay line. It instructed children to hold up the phone to the TV. Then the commercial played the telephone tones and the call was automatically connected. ”

You have to admit, that was a pretty damn cool thing to come up with in the 1980′s. Shady and wrong and costing struggling families a bunch of money for nothing, obviously, but still very cool. He doesn’t seem like such a bad guy for just running a bunch of “free” chatlines, but I guess they might have been into some shady stuff since he was running 72 separate corporations back in the 90′s. I wonder why he wants the article removed. So I write this back to him:

I was a little confused about Ian’s signature of “none.” Within 10 minutes, Ian writes back:

Ooohhh, trying to butter me up by complimenting me. I assume he’s talking about the message on the PLA Radio voicemail. Flattery will get you everywhere, Ian! So I decide to cut a deal with him and I send him this:

Then Ian insults me by writing back with this:

Wow, an email where he almost uses a complete sentence! Maybe this is a grown man after all. I retort with this:

Ian ups his price, just a little with this:

Lol? What is he, 14? I hate LOL so much. Trying to to do slightly better with my negotiating skills than I did back in 2004 to take back phonelosers.net, I repsond with:

And finally, Ian says:

I really would have done it for $10,000 too! I have no shame in selling out. Just look at the millions of dollars I make each year by selling PLA tshirts. Yes, if anyone wants to have anything removed from phonelosers.org, just send me $10,000 and it’s gone! Or $25,000 once the economy picks back up. Later that evening, linear and I were chatting about Ian Eisenberg’s weirdness and wondering why he would want a 15-year-old article about him removed. We speculated that maybe he’s trying to find investors for some crazy new scheme of his and didn’t want his name to be muddied in Google searches.

We looked around on Google and linear noticed that a month earlier he was trying to have a Wikipedia article about himself removed, reasoning, “Current article focuses too much on the negative aspects of this person and if these are removed, there’s nothing left that would warrant the article to exist to begin with.” Then we found an article about his Chapter 7 with Blue Frog mobile nullified and another page about him wanting to start a bidding war on a Paris Hilton sex tape. Then linear found this and this and an FTC “cyberspace complaint”, whatever the hell that is.

Anyway, sorry we couldn’t cut a deal, Ian, but I think that the title of this article will help you out a little. And I hope cleaning up your reputation on Google goes well. Hey, at least your facebook profile looks good, right?

Richard Cardo, after devoting years of his life to rigorous detective work, has finished his video investigation on the 1996 CuervoCon attendees, concluding that RBCP hid under Jonbenet Ramsey’s bed while some 15-year-old girl named Patty (who flew to Denver on Christmas day, at age 15, without her parents noticing) lured Jonbenet to the kitchen. Soon after that, RBCP penned the ransom note and, well, you probably know the rest.

It’s obvious that the Boulder police will take Richard’s brilliant detective work very seriously and will be closing in on RBCP and Patty very soon. As a result, phonelosers.org probably won’t exist for much longer. Sorry everyone, but it looks as if things will come to an end here soon.

Last week I threw together a video and put it on YouTube. It was my attempt at some lame humor, using Richard’s last video and dubbing over his voice to make it seem as if he’s confessing to the murder and clearing my name. Here’s that video:

The day Richard finished his video series, he noticed my parody and threw a fit, sending me this angry email

Like I’m worried about a silly little lawsuit when his investigation is going to put me in prison for murder. After writing this, Richard contacted YouTube and demanded that my parody be taken down. YouTube complied and the video was taken down later that day. People trying to view it were shown this message instead:

Seeing how easy it is to convince YouTube to take down videos, I decided to make a claim against part 13 in his series since it used a photograph of me and PLA artwork. It worked and that video was taken down within 24 hours. But Patty, my co-conspirator in Richard’s investigation, outdid me that day by demanding the takedown of 13 of Richard’s videos. Only a day after Richard had concluded his investigation on us, after years of hard work, and suddenly nearly half of them are missing. Richard Cardo is probably not a happy man about this, especially after he thought he was so clever by figuring out a way to take down my videos.

By the way, if Richard has used any of your copyrighted material in his videos, this easy form on YouTube will allow you to make a copyright claim against him. Don’t abuse it!

This morning, Richard renamed his last video from “Epilogue” to “Who murdered JonBenet? pt. 36″ so it appears that maybe recent events have made Richard decide not to conclude his investigation after all. Keep an eye on his YouTube account for the next exciting installment of Who Murdered JonBenet! And be on the lookout for Richard’s book too! Because we all know that is a reality.

Click here to discuss Richard Cardo in the PLA Forums

January 24th Edit: I’ve made a new YouTube video for Richard to complain about and have taken down which debunks a few of his theories about me and asks Richard to make amends for his mistakes. Here it is:

Also, keep an eye on www.phonelosers.org/richardcardo/ where I plan to put up the complete hilarious Richard Cardo story.

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!

So where is the line drawn? Is it okay to prank abuse hotlines? Suicide hotlines? Drug and alcohol hotlines? In my opinion, no. Leave all of these places alone. There are so many other people and businesses out there that you can prank, so why bother with any kind of hotline service?

But then there’s the Anger Management Hotline. Now that just sounds hilarious. A hotline set up for people who have anger issues. There can’t be anything too illegal about calling up some anger management people and giving them a little hell. They’re just asking to be pranked, right? Apparently not, as Carlito from Madhouse Radio recently found out.

Madhouse Radio is a fun prank call show to listen to. I’ve been a fan of it for quite some time now, and there’s always plenty of entertaining bits throughout the show to keep me listening. I was surprised to see one of the more recent show descriptions, though. It read, “Historic Madhouse show, Carlitos studio gets shut down by the police hence the short length and sudden cut off. An anger management line is not amused with Carlito and Hollywood.” Wow.

If you take a listen to the 12/18/2008 show you’ll hear Carlito’s call at about 14 minutes, 55 seconds. He calls the lady on the other end a motherfucker, a piece of trash and a stupid bitch and she somehow considers his call threatening enough to send the police to his house and he’s arrested.

On the Madhouse forums, Carlito says, “I did some calls to an anger management line on Thursday night’s show. The woman considered it ‘Violent Calls’ which they weren’t and she reported us to the local PD here based on the SpoofCard caller ID (came up with my local 407 area code). During the show our phone line got intercepted and rerouted (HOW THAT IS LEGAL I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA) to the local 911 dispatch. Based on that they were able to get my address and immediately dispatched 2 units to the house in about 15 minutes. Apparently this Anger Management line/company has some kind of special ‘emergency line’ status and they can get shit done.”

You see that? He used SpoofCard and they were still able to do some magical rerouting wizardry with the phone lines and get his address within 15 minutes. And he didn’t even threaten the lady – he simply cursed at her as a part of his shtick of needing help with his anger issues. If you think pranking “crisis” hotlines (how is anger management even a crisis??) is funny, then this should tell you that it’s officially a horrible idea. Stick to spouting your nonsense at normal businesses and people.

Visit this thread on the Madhouse forums to read more of Carlito’s story, about how they confiscated his computers, ranksacked his studios breaking furniture in the process, and spent a night in jail. Thankfully he was let go the next day, all the charges were dropped and his stuff returned. So it’s a happy ending, but would you really want to go through all that just to make a funny call to a hotline number?

Next time someone on the bridge says, “LOL, let’s prank the suicide hotline!!!” point them to this article and tell them to shut the hell up.

During last summer’s HOPE conference, WhiteSword took a PLA sticker-covered cactus all over the con and forced people to take pictures with it. The 2 pictures of Emmanuel Goldstein looking annoyed next to the cactus make browsing the 70+ pictures completely worth it.

You should also take a look at the latest two videos on PLA’s YouTube for pictures of the inflatable cacti in action.

For the past 2 years, the PLA’s videos have been stored in RBCP’s YouTube account, mixed in with his boring videos about Legos, kids, rubix cubes, gadget addiction, nature and Mormon torture. But now you can finally watch great PLA videos without all RBCP’s annoying personal crap by subscribing to the brand new Phone Losers of America YouTube!

It’s located at www.youtube.com/phonelosersofamerica and will carry all of the PLA videos. Currently only a small portion of the PLA videos are on the new account, but the rest of them will turn up eventually. So be sure to unsubscribe from RBCP’s lame account and start watching this new one instead. You also might want to take a look at these YouTube accounts…

www.youtube.com/user/PrankyCallz – Legend813′s prank call archive includes lots of calls from this website.
www.youtube.com/user/w3baholicX – We only like this guy because he made a soundboard of Mr. Spessa.
www.youtube.com/user/soundboardprankcalls – If you’re into soundboard pranks, you might like this channel.
www.youtube.com/user/FridayNightCranks – This guy occasionally does some pretty funny stuff.
www.youtube.com/rbcp – A great channel to watch if you like listening to looped techno while RBCP rides through the woods for 10 minutes.
www.youtube.com/phonelosersofamerica – The official new YouTube for PLA!

And if you want to see some of the greatest YouTube stuff ever, take a look at the YouTube thread on our forums.

1.) Our Wal-Mart Black Friday video, which was based on PLA Radio Episode #21, has been featured on the main page of eBaum’s World for 2 weeks now! This has brought a lot of new visitors to the site – more than 45,000 per day at the beginning. Most importantly, this has proven that our new server can handle lots of traffic. Thanks, eBaum!

2.) PLA’s Voice Bridge has been experiencing some downtime this week. We assume this is due to the extreme weather conditions in Minnesota. I’m too lazy to look for alternate bridges right now, but if you visit the voice bridge forums or go to #phonelosers on efnet, you can probably get another number to call.

3.) phonelosers.net is experiencing some downtime this weekend as linear moves to a new server. Hopefully his site and forums will be back up by tomorrow.

4.) Richard Cardo put up a new video! Then he took it down after accidentally leaving the comments open on it and not enjoying the flood of comments from PLA forum members. Then he wrote RBCP a couple of angry messages. View this thread to read them.

5.) Post your favorite YouTube videos and/or channels in the comments. This is an order!

00:00 Texting your way to love
00:32 Intro by Trevelyn
01:31 Shmoocon – Click here for our planning page.
02:02 New UPL issue
02:20 I Shop At Walmart – by CacaMan
04:00 Answering calls
08:50 We Go To Wal-Mart Every Day – Katie and Alyssa
09:30 Olympus Telephone Recorder
10:04 More calls
17:07 Take it Back – Steve Goodie
21:00 www.phonelosers.org/wal-mart
26:19 I Shop At Walmart – by CacaMan
30:31 Bonus material – RBCP getting busted by a Wal-Mart employee

Something I forgot to mention in this episode is that it’s easy to locate Wal-Mart store phones by looking at the support poles up near the ceiling. Poles that have phones on them are wrapped with blue tape. Poles that have fire extinguishers on them are wrapped with red tape. And to get on the all-store page, you need to dial #96.

There’s a whole page on having fun with store phones located at www.phonelosers.org/article/storephones/. It covers fun things to do in stores and things to dial on all kinds of different store phones. And then there’s our Wal-Mart page, which has even more answered calls and other Wal-Marty funness.

I made a video version of this episode a few days after it was released. As of this writing, it’s been watched 10,000 times on YouTube and over 105,000 times on Ebaums. It’s also been linked from dozens of blogs and forums. Not bad for just a week. Thanks again, Black Friday shoppers!

If you’ve ended up here from the video, be sure to listen to the podcast too since it’s got more calls, longer calls, and explains things slightly better than on the video.

On February 6th, 2009, members from the PLA Forums will be converging on the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington D.C. to plan, scheme, impersonate, attack, pillage, impregnate, terrorize, etc. Incidentally, this is the very same hotel that Shmoocon will be held at on the very same weekend.

Attendees will include, but are not limited to, RTF, Trevelyn, Rogue Clown and RBCP. I’m trying to harass altalp and murd0c into attending, but they’re not caving in quite yet. murd0c is just afraid I’ll get him kicked out of the hotel and nearly arrested again like I did at Phreaknic. Some people can just never let go of a grudge. handl3r claims him and some others will be sneaking across the Canadian border to attend. And Sidepocket says he’ll probably make it too.

Everyone reading this should immediately call up their favorite airline and book tickets to D.C. to hang out with us all. It’ll be fun. It’s hard to get tickets to Shmoocon, but who cares. You can still go to room parties and other parts of the hotels without Shmoocon badges. We’ll all do plenty of stuff outside of Shmoocon too, so it’d still be worth taking a weekend vacation just to hang out with all your favorite PLA people.

If you want to discuss this event, here’s our official planning thread on the forums. The PLA/UPL Twitter will be updated throughout the weekend with the whereabouts of the PLA group. And if you haven’t noticed yet, I stuck a countdown timer over there in the left sidebar to make you feel bad about the impending con that you won’t be attending because you have to act all responsible and pay your rent instead of visiting us.

See you there!

As long as I’m doing an update here, I should mention a few things…

(1) Tickets for Shmoocon go on sale tomorrow (November 1st) at noon! Quite a few PLA people are planning on showing up there to wreak havoc, including RBCP, Trevelyn, Rogue Clown, Rob T. Firefly and others. Click here to see the PLA’s Shmoocon planning page.

(2) Spessa keeps hacking road signs. Take a look at the hilarity on signhacker.com.

(3) People are sending me lots of voicemails, telling me I’m going to hell for the latest PLA Radio. You should too! (505) 796-4020

(4) It’s not too late to vote for PLA Radio at the Podcast Awards!

(5) Holy shit, altalp, that pumpkin rules!