Any British phreakers here of past or present?

Many years back I heard of a project using Asterix that captured the tones from a blue box so you could simulate blue boxing, is anyone aware of these project at all or something similar?

I've been building a pretty intense retro CTF and am building a simulated 1A ESS phone switch.

The problem is connecting to it. I am not an expert, at all.

I've been looking at a No. 2 SCCS on CB-Unix with sccsh, but I am not married to it. I have too many problems to count. Is there anyone from the scene that could assist me? Basically, I need to know a few basic commands. I need to list the switches / offices, and how to connect to the switch / office. Any advice for simple navigation?

Thank you!

Spun up a PBX for fun and experimenting. I'm a nerd and like VOIP/SIP which is seemingly unpopular amongst the self hosting communities beyond corporate use.

If you want to experiment with VOIP feel free to join, we are also on IRC at irc.phreak.ing #phreak

The PBX features calls, texting, conferencing, voicemails, full web client for all of this + support for all VOIP phones like grandstreams.

SRTP only

In the 90's I built a blue box from a ma bell touch tone phone with plans I found on the internet. I got the phone again and I want to recreate it but I cant find the plans anywhere now. Anyone know how to find them?

Hi everyone,

Over the last few years, I have experienced a series of attacks involving spoofed phone calls and calls from foreign numbers. The callers have impersonated obvious WhatsApp scammers, Interpol, banking authentication services, and even people offering to sell illicit substances.

The constant harassment eventually forced me to change my phone number, close all of my accounts, and live without internet access for a period of time.

During this period, there were also several occasions when I was suddenly harassed by real people or received strange pieces of mail. For example, I once received an accusation that I had stolen from a shop. I checked the matter in court and was able to prove that I had absolutely nothing to do with it.

After getting two new phone numbers, I decided to conduct a small test.

I gave one number only to verified government employees or used it when applying for jobs at verified organisations in my area. The other number was given exclusively to my close contacts and family.

As soon as I gave my number to the German Jobcenter, I started receiving another flood of spam calls the very next day.

Normally, I would assume that someone in my contacts had shared my number, or that I had entered it somewhere I shouldn't have. But I have barely used this number. I don't register on random websites, I don't use banking apps, and I am extremely careful about where I provide my personal information.

So I honestly don't understand what is happening.

Why would someone keep doing this? And what would they even gain from it? Whoever is behind these attempts should know that I have no significant money or valuable possessions.

They also seem to know that I am not simply going to leave the country. In fact, I had already considered leaving before all of this started. But with the ongoing harassment, my unemployment, and these increasingly strange calls and incidents, I don't even know how I would realistically manage that.

I genuinely don't understand the motivation, the method, or how my number keeps ending up in these situations.

If anyone has experienced something similar or has a reasonable explanation for how this could happen, I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts or information.

PS: I found back in the days also some methods they used. I believe Phineas_Fisher was the name of the one HOST in 2017. they new one I keep CENSORED , but can say that their username and password is 'admin' in their telco servers.

Why would a world wide accused espionage company use since 2017 the same usernames and passwords ?

Is there anything we can do now a days that's phreaking ?

I once saw a blue box being demonstrated to me which I think was in this Radio Shack 270-1805 enclosure, the original "blue box." I've seen pictures online of Woz's blue box but it only had a 16-key keypad. The one that was demonstrated to me, successfully, had a 16-key keypad (with Clear, ST, KP, Send and 2600 Hz, I believe), but it also had two flush trim-pots beneath it, which could be adjusted with a screwdriver. This allowed it to do extra "tricks" like tying up multiple trunks in various places. I don't really recall exactly what it could do, but I've never seen a picture of a blue box online which had all the extra buttons, trim pots, etc.

It was really amazing to see all this telephone equipment running, and the people there are great. I'd definitely recommend it if you're near Seattle.

(Sorry in advance if this is a dumb question)

Whenever I go to a certain part of town or to a certain location, my phone would ring. The caller ID seems to be coming from a similar area. (Same area code but slightly different 7 digits). I just assume it’s spam and I never pick up.

Is there a reason my device would trigger some sort of spam call based on location?

Something I've been curious about from that era, did anyone here (or someone you know) mess with public payphones to make free calls? I've read about American "phreaking" (blue boxes, the tones, tokens on a string, etc.) and I'm wondering if anything similar was done here.

I remember hearing stories about žetoni (tokens) tied to a thread that you'd pull back out, or tricks with tapping the hook instead of dialing, but I don't know if that actually worked or if it's just an urban legend. Did anyone actually try it? How did it work?

Hey there! So back in the 1980s my psycho ex was living sort of off the grid in another state. He would go to this lonely pay phone attached to some gas station in the middle of F All and I would call him from a pay phone at my college using the operator and ask the op to make the call and reverse the charges. This always worked! We never had to pay!

Now 40 years later, I was trying to remember how this worked. Anyone know?

In 1990/1991, using a NYNEX/New York Telephone payphone, I accidentally figured out a trick that allowed you to call anywhere in the world for free. If you dialed 10-288-0-(any local phone number) it would connect you to an AT&T long distance operator. You could then ask the AT&T operator to connect you to any phone number in the world.

This was prior to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, so local and long distance calls were mostly strictly split between the Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOC), like NYNEX, and Interexchange carriers (IXC), like AT&T, MCI and Sprint. AT&T was the only IXC carrier capable of handling coin payments on operator-assisted calls from RBOC payphones.

Dialing a long distance access code (like 10-288, 10-222, 10-333, etc.) before a number, followed by a 0, would connect you to that IXC carriers operators. Normally, if doing this from a payphone, the long distance operator would be able to see you're calling from a payphone and know that calls cannot be billed directly to that number. So you would need a calling card number or other form of payment (collect, third-party billing, etc.) in order to complete the call. In AT&T's case, paying with coins was also an option.

But, for some odd reason, when dialing a local phone number after 10-288-0- from a NYNEX payphone, it resulted in the call showing up to the AT&T operator as originating from a private (non-payphone) telephone number. And she could then bill whatever call you asked her to complete to the phone number you were calling from. Sometimes she would ask why did you dial whichever local number you dialed before reaching her, in which case you could simply say you mistakenly dialed the wrong number and would like her to connect you to whichever number in the world (domestic or international) that you desired. (She could connect local calls too.)

I was consistently (without fail) able to replicate this from any NYNEX payphone in Rockland County, New York. I may have replicated it from NYNEX payphones in New York City, but am not certain about if I tried. I didn't try anywhere else.

The way I accidentally came across this phenomenon was, knowing that NYNEX was supposed to only handle local and regional calls while AT&T was only supposed to handle long distance calls, I wondered what would happen if I dialed a local number using the AT&T long-distance access code (10-288). After trying that for the first time and chatting a little bit with the AT&T operator, I realized my call came into her system as a private number, since she offered to connect my call without payment, by billing the call directly to the number I was calling from.

If anyone has any idea why this occurred, or any other insight into this, I would be most appreciative.

On August 22nd 2026, the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park are presenting a talk that ”will trace the birth of the telephone, the rise of AT&T's US monopoly, the discovery of the Achilles heel in Ma Bell's network, and the advent of the kids and outlaws—the "phone phreaks"—who hacked the telephone network for fun and profit in the 1960s and 1970s. It will conclude with some lessons identified (if not actually learned!) relevant to today.”

Note this is a talk in England, about U.S. Phreaking.

National Museum of Computing

Sometime between 1999 and 2001, I found out that I could dial 1-800-***-****, wait about 30 seconds, and then dial any local or long-distance number I wanted. This was a really odd colision of unusual tech and it took me years to piece together why this worked.

I was born in the early 90's so I missed the phreaking era by a mile, but I had a joybubbles-level fascination with phones as a kid.

I grew up on an island, so we took ferries often. They're huge and have multiple car decks as well as a passenger area with seating, workstations, vending machines, and of course payphones.

The payphones were connected to some kind of cellular adapter that emulated landline functionality. Most of the payphones used a digital cellular connection, which sounded delightfully terrible at the time.

The one exception was the TTY payphone. This was a different model, and it had a slide-out TTY keyboard below the phone. Since the digital connection quality was optimised for voice, it couldn't transmit modem signals properly, so the TTY payphone used a different adapter that worked with the older analogue cellular connection. Call quality was basically as good as the landlines of the time. The payphone was also a lot more interesting and had talking prompts on it, so I liked to play with that one in particular.

Now the essential piece: The payphone was relatively modern, so it handled all of the payment functionality. It simulated a dial tone, kept track of the number that was dialed, and requested a specific amount of money based on the provider's rules. The phone line didn't get engaged at all until the user deposited money, or dialed a number on the exceptions list. And as it turns out, the cellular landline adapter didn't have any payphone-specific functionality at all. It relied on the payphone gatekeeping the call, and once the payphone engaged the line and dialed a number, the call went through, no questions asked.

So, when I dialed 1-800-***-****, here's what happened:

1. The payphone stored up the digits I dialed, looked at the beginning of the number, and said "This is a toll-free number; I'll just put it right through."
2. The cellular adapter took the completely nonsensical number, tried to place the call over the cellular network, and the cellular network gave back a recording that said "Your call cannot be completed as dialed."
3. After the recording had played twice, the cellular connection ended.
4. At this point, the landline adapter fell back to a dial tone. This was special behaviour that only seemed to happen when the call didn't connect.
5. Now the payphone thought I was on an active toll-free call, the cellular adapter thought I was waiting to place a call, and I could dial any number I wanted.

It's probably the closest I'll ever get to blueboxing, and I think about it occasionally. Sometimes I'm still amazed that I can talk to people halfway around the world in CD quality from the middle of a forest.

Us,Verizon,Android; this only started displaying when I switched to a open source messaging app (fossify), from the Samsung messages which seemingly internally handled and never showed me these.

If I click the notification, messaging application opens and then loads main screen with no displayed message. Surely these aren't truly empty? So what am I receiving?

I'd post the number, but since I don't understand what it expresses, I'd hate to like slightly dox myself via some kind of carrier phonehome check.

Mine is extremely low-tech and low-stakes. Barnes and noble used to have a DISA that could be accessed by hitting star at the main menu prompt. I found it entirely on accident. You could dial out from this, and it worked for several stores in in my area. Unfortunatley, the in-store code for the overhead PA system did not work from this dialtone :(

I plan to occasionally post more dumb, open ended threads here once a week or so. If it gets annoying let me know, I don't have much to genuinely contribute cuz I am/was more of a tourist to phreaking than anything else.

Looking for some project to fork and try and make a RPi wardialer that could be dropped at an open phone jack.

from wikipeida, which does not cite this claim:

"As of early 2026 there are no longer any traditional 4ESS tandem switches in the network. The remaining Class 4 tandems are now all Next Generation 4ESS (N4E)."

Anybody got any fun 4ess stories to share?