Section 2 - Phreaks & Phreaking

2.0 Phreaking

A major part of Phreaking is attempting to obtain phone calls for free or below the rate at which the phone company would like to charge. The alt.ph.uk news group is not here to teach people how to defraud phone companies though, and most of the discussion is likely to be of purely technical interest.

Acrylic  Steal Three-Way-Calling, Call Waiting and programmable

         Call Forwarding on old 4-wire phone systems                    NO!

Aqua     Drain the voltage of the FBI lock-in-trace/trap-trace          NO!

Beige    Linemans handset                                               YES

Black    Allow callers to dial in for free                              NO

Blast    Phone microphone amplifier                                     YES

Blotto   Supposedly shorts every fone out in the immediate area         JOKE

Blue     Take operator control of a line (phone for free)               NO

Brown    Create a party line from 2 phone lines                         YES

Bud      Tap into your neighbors phone line                             YES

Chartreuse   Use the electricity from your phone line                   YES

Cheese   Connect two phones to create a diverter                        YES

Chrome   Alter traffic lights                                           NO

Clear    A telephone pickup coil and a small amp used to make free      NO!

         calls on Fortress Phones

Color    Line activated telephone recorder                              YES

Copper   Cause crosstalk interference on an extender                    ???

Crimson  Hold button                                                    YES

Dark     Re-route outgoing or incoming calls to another phone           NO!

Dayglo   Connect to your neighbors phone line                           YES

Divertor Re-route outgoing or incoming calls to another phone           NO!

DLOC     Create a party line from 2 phone lines                         YES

Gold     Dialout router                                                 ???

Green    Emulate the Coin Collect, Coin Return, and Ringback tones      NO!

Infinity Remotely activated phone tap                                   YES

Jack     Touch-Tone key pad                                             YES

Light    In-use light                                                   YES

Lunch    AM transmitter                                                 YES

Magenta  Connect a remote phone line to another remote phone line       NO!

Mauve    Phone tap without cutting into a line                          ???

Neon     External microphone                                            YES

Noise    Create line noise                                              YES

Olive    External ringer                                                YES

Party    Create a party line from 2 phone lines                         YES

Pearl    Tone generator                                                 YES

Pink     Create a party line from 2 phone lines                         YES

Purple   Telephone hold button                                          YES

Rainbow  Kill a trace by putting 120v into the phone line (joke)        JOKE

Razz     Tap into your neighbors phone                                  YES

Red      Free calls from payphones                                      YES

Rock     Add music to your phone line                                   YES

Scarlet  Cause a neighbors phone line to have poor reception            YES

Static   Keep the voltage on a phone line high                          YES

Switch   Add hold, indicator lights, conferencing, etc..                ???

Tan      Line activated telephone recorder                              YES

Tron     Reverse the phase of power to your house, causing

         your electric meter to run slower                              ???

TV Cable "See" sound waves on your TV                                   ???

Urine    Create a capacitative disturbance between the ring and

         tip wires in another's telephone headset                       ???

Violet   Keep a payphone from hanging up                                NO!

White    Portable DTMF keypad                                           YES

Yellow   Add an extension phone                                         YES

DOES ANYONE FANCY KEEPING THIS LIST (+ WORKING DIAGS) UP TO DATE. IT WOULD MAKE A VERY VALUABLE RESOURCE

             1209Hz     1336Hz     1477Hz     1633Hz

697Hz          1          2          3          A

770Hz          4          5          6          B

852Hz          7          8          9          C

941Hz          *          0          #          D

Mercury's country direct numbers are evenly distributed through out the 0500 xxxxxx range.

Country direct numbers are numbers which forwards calls to a regular number in the remote country. I believe these numbers are arranged with your local Telco, who rent a number of 0800/0500 lines from BT/Mercury and pay BT/Mercury for incoming calls over them. The remote telco then resells these numbers to company's requiring a toll-free number from the UK. You are not charged for the call, the company you reach is paying for the call, as with all 0800/0500 numbers.

The UK.Telecom FAQ gives a method of obtain a list of US companies with UK 0800 numbers from AT&T

[ Has anyone tried this ? ]

You can block the sending of your phone number you are dialling by prefixing it with 141. Your also have the number of the last person who called (from a phone that supplies caller ID) by dialing 1471 (on some exchanges this number can be automatically redial by dialing 1474)