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Secret tricks and closely-guarded info in the pre-internet age

Started by Barry Admin, May 20, 2017, 12:26:32 PM

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maett

I was told that these BT phonecards back in the mid to late 80s could have their credit renewed by painting nail polish over the indentations that would appear after each call on the back. But I only found this information out towards the arse end of their existence and I rarely had need to call anyone when out and about anyway so can't confirm the veracity.


thraxx


It's true. My brother and I used to collect these cards from the piss stinking puic phones at Walton On Thames post office.  Sometimes the little notches weren't removed properly sby the machine so the cards could be used again. Once hacked, the cards would be used to make 'funny phonecalls', in invariably to my lovely Grandpa, where we'd phone up and ask to speak to 'Mr Shitty'.  More innocent days.

Barry Admin



"Harro?"




Remember the Network 7 segment, where they showed how to cheat a cash machine? You needed someone else's code, I guess, then you stuck a strip of video-tape over the back of the card and used it. Something like that.

I used to love reading about "phone phreaking" and all that stuff. I think the amazing Amiga disk-mag "Grapevine" used to have stuff like this in the scene section. I would spend hours and hours reading each copy, trying to decipher what was going on in the scene, and what any of it really meant. Greets/fuckings to you.

Dex Sawash

Forgot this one, the arcade in my town took coins, not tokens. The change attendant would give you five quarters for a dollar bill. Never had the willpower to not jam them all immediately in a machine though.

easytarget

[tag]fruit machine engineer leaves thread disappointed[/tag]

BeardFaceMan

The one I remember is gluing old school 5p pieces and 1p pieces together, this was after the 5ps went out of circulation so were a bit hard to come by but for some reason my dad had a pint glass full of them.  You could then use them as pound coins in machines, they were temperamental as fuck but I won quite a bit of cash out of fruit machines with this method. I stopped short of using my uncles method for fruit machines which was to go to a service station, go to a fruit machine, jam a screwdriver on either side of the display where thereels were, pop it open, reach in and grab the cash then leg it to his mate waiting in the car outside.

Sebastian Cobb

If you had the cajones/the pub was dark busy enough both those free standing tab machines and fruity's would spill their guts if you turned them upside down.

Hangthebuggers

Not as delicate or intricate as your lot. But my mate used to make a small fortune by PUNCHING the phone box phones as hard as possible. He swore blind that it worked, I never believed him until one day he took me on a tour of his paper round. Three phone boxes on that route. He'd walk past, punch it as hard as possible and 50p's and £1's and such would fall out.

I recall at my School the pay phone could connect to numbers for free, but the other end couldn't hear you talk. So you could call premium lines and listen. Which ment spending an entire term calling the Tango hotline listening to some tart tell me off for being addicted to Apple Tango. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yklxtx6CPMQ

Dusty Gozongas

Abusing the occasional PBX might have been fun if I ever tried that stuff. There were probably various ways of getting free phonecalls or downloading cracked Amiga software from dodgy bulletin boards way back in the 90s when I wasn't doing anything like that at all.

There's a good chance you would've had to do this sort of thing outside office hours because basically you'd have been fucking around with prepaid business telecom systems and using a freephone number to connect to an outside line from the PBX. Naughty naughty. And I guess you'd have to remember to make sure that you returned the system back to normal after you were done, so as not to spoil shit for the next naughty sod who may wish to abuse a flawed system.

I'm sure I'd occasionally reminisce about messing around with dialup modems and Hayes commands if I'd ever been that sort of person.

mjwilson

Quote from: Baby Of The Year on May 20, 2017, 04:12:17 PM
Much to my disgust, I moved back to Herne Bay a year ago after spending my 20s wanting to escape. I can confirm that the Telly-Go-Round is still a 'popular' local attraction.

Wow. I would have assumed it was long gone.
Based on YouTube, it's been modernised though, with all kinds of non-Magic Roundabout nonsense.

Rich Uncle Skeleton



I used to wrap a 1p piece in paper and these would accept it as a 20p. Giant vending machines with the keypads etc weren't so easily fooled obviously, but a handful of skittles or whatever for a penny after swimming lessons was always welcome.

Gurke and Hare

Quote from: holyzombiejesus on May 20, 2017, 02:19:04 PM
One thing that did work but was pointless was rather then dial numbers, just tap the cradle thing that amount of times, leaving a little gap in between digits. It would connect you but it wasn't free or anything.

It wasn't pointless if, like my friend Scott, your dad had put a lock on the dial to stop his children running up massive phone bills.

Dusty Gozongas

Quote from: Gurke and Hare on May 21, 2017, 01:13:12 PM
It wasn't pointless if, like my friend Scott, your dad had put a lock on the dial to stop his children running up massive phone bills.

Indeed. My own folks put one of those useless things on our phone too. I always made a point of showing friends  how easy it was to circumvent it although a fair proportion were already aware of it.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Quote from: Hangthebuggers on May 20, 2017, 09:46:12 PM
Not as delicate or intricate as your lot. But my mate used to make a small fortune by PUNCHING the phone box phones as hard as possible. He swore blind that it worked, I never believed him until one day he took me on a tour of his paper round. Three phone boxes on that route. He'd walk past, punch it as hard as possible and 50p's and £1's and such would fall out.

He also hated phones.

Mr Banlon

Quote from: maett on May 20, 2017, 06:52:45 PM
I was told that these BT phonecards back in the mid to late 80s could have their credit renewed by painting nail polish over the indentations that would appear after each call on the back. But I only found this information out towards the arse end of their existence and I rarely had need to call anyone when out and about anyway so can't confirm the veracity.

I light coat of hairspray used to work too.
When London Transport introduced the yellow tickets in the mid-80s, you could remove the printed date with a pin and bleach, and then stipple a new date on with an isograph/TD pen. You couldn't put them through the automated barriers (which were few and far between at the time) but you could flash them at the bloke in the ticket kiosk no probs. I made a travel card last ages.
They also had daily LT bus passes at that time that were like scratch cards. You had to scratch off the date from a grid. If you collected enough discarded used ones, you could cut out all the date squares with a scalpel and Pritstik un-scratched dates over scratched out ones and use it again.
When I was in New York I used to use payphones to reverse-charge the payphone opposite my mate's house back in England.
They cottoned on after a week though.

Barry Admin

Hehe I love it, love all the ingenuity. "Thrift is the gleaner behind all human effort."

kngen

There was a phone number you could dial which (I presume) was for engineers to test the line. You dialled it, hung up and 30 second later the phone would ring. Great for doing in a friend's house when they're not looking and then beating them to answering the phone when it rings - 'Who's this? kngen's mum? Aye he's here. Whit? Fuck off you fat cow! *click*'  - which my friends did to me, causing much apoplexy, the bastards

Lead tape on the side of a 10p did indeed make vending machines think it was a 50p, which - when a can of Coke cost 30p - gave you 20p in change. Me and a mate attempted to get into a student union disco (price £2.50) by turning a handful of change into a fiver by this method. We nearly made it, but were discovered in a toilet cubicle by the bouncers doing a sweep of the building before closing it to non-ticket holders. I think the sight of two men crammed into a bathroom stall surrounded by about 20 cans of coke confused them so much that they let us in without tickets and we were able to buy two pints each - paid in 10p pieces - instead. Excelsior!

im barry bethel

Not so much a trick but in the early days of Sky TV you could pick up a scrambler card in the fishing tackle shop, go home and ring up Sky ask them to activate it (important to tell sky you'd signed the agreement  in the shop) then pop it in the decoder bought over the bootfair for two weeks of free telly, then back to the fishing shop for a new one.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: im barry bethel on May 21, 2017, 06:02:22 PM
Not so much a trick but in the early days of Sky TV you could pick up a scrambler card in the fishing tackle shop, go home and ring up Sky ask them to activate it (important to tell sky you'd signed the agreement  in the shop) then pop it in the decoder bought over the bootfair for two weeks of free telly, then back to the fishing shop for a new one.

Those cards were deactivated by the decoder shocking the chip in the card, if you popped the lid off the decoder and cut the right contact on the card reader it no longer did that and it worked until the codes ran out.

On Digital was rife for piracy as well, there was even a bug in the pay per view software that meant the right sequence of button presses would make it go away without phoning up, probably why they went bump.

mippy

Quote from: mjwilson on May 20, 2017, 02:23:51 PM
At Herne Bay back in the 70s, maybe 80s, there was a Magic Roundabout sort of machine thing, and if you put in 1p or 2p or something, then one of the characters would appear from behind a door. There was a rotating wheel at the bottom, and depending on when you put your 5p in, the ball would fall in one of the slots at the bottom and that would decide which character you saw.

One of the slots on the roulette wheel thingy was a jackpot, in which case all of the characters came out from behind their doors, and the train came out around the bottom of the machine too.

Getting to the point, the secret of getting a jackpot was to put your 10p in when the "jackpot" slot was at the lowest point during the rotation of the wheel.

(Best of luck to anyone trying to make use of this information.)

The machine was still there when we were there in 2015!

Mr Banlon

The old pull-drawer Nestles and Lindt vending machines on the London Underground had two metal flaps on the coin-return slot. If you pushed hard enough on the flaps (ooh err), the inner one would jam at a 90 dgree angle and stop the returned coins from falling onto the tray.

The machines were always faulty and 9 time out of 10 the drawers wouldn't open so people would press the coin return to get their money back. The money would fall, but not get past the jammed metal. All you had to do was use a scriber to pull the flap down and release the coins.

Ian Drunken Smurf

The old 5p coin used to be the same size as the 1 Deutschemark piece - making the amount of pool played on the German exchange particularly noteworthy. A tenners worth of 5p pieces was the kindest present for early 90s ex DDR kids. Even if it did lead to lots of smoking...

Twed

This isn't really the right thread for it but it's a hustle[nb]all though not really[/nb] that happened today.

I decided I was getting oysters. They're $1.25 each or $7.99 for a bag of seven. Supermarket labelled the bags at the individual price, didn't they? Grabbed the three remaining bags, got 'em down to the self-service checkout. BOSH. $3.75 for 21 oysters.

I am going to puking brine tomorrow.

touchingcloth

Quote from: Twed on May 21, 2017, 10:47:14 PM
This isn't really the right thread for it but it's a hustle[nb]all though not really[/nb]

[tag]Newly missing forum markup features resulting in accidental Snoop Dogg song titles in posts.[/tag]

HappyTree

Quote from: kngen on May 21, 2017, 05:49:04 PM
There was a phone number you could dial which (I presume) was for engineers to test the line. You dialled it, hung up and 30 second later the phone would ring.

174. It never got old.


Rich Uncle Skeleton

hahah god why did I not know about this when I was a kid?? To think how differently my life could have been.



Not really related, but this thread's reminding me of a time a few years ago when I was getting a train ticket at the self service machine and I don't know if something was jammed inside or what, but instead of getting mixed change, around twenty pound coins came pouring out! Got my friend to use the machine after me and the same thing happened.

Still no idea how it happened or how long it had been going on/continued that day, but the free journey and beer money was lovely. Obviously used only that machine for a few weeks in the vain hope that it would happen again.

Howj Begg

People used to think that bearers bit off their own testicles so dogs and hunters would be entranced by them, and thus escape being killed.

https://www.wired.com/2014/10/fantastically-wrong-people-used-think-beavers-bit-testicles/