Phreak out the Robocallers

In 1957 a phenomenon was started by a whistling blind child later to be known as phreaking - a portmanteau of phone and freak. Basically, this has to do with hacking telecommunication systems.

The first time I ran into this was in college where a fellow student demonstrated how he was able to make free long distance phone calls by playing back selected tones into a pay phone receiver on operator assisted calls. Each tone signaled the insertion of a coin into the phone thus tricking the system into thinking he was paying for it.

Much of the traditional techniques used by phreaks have become obsolete and nowadays and phreaking has moved to the internet, practiced by descendants that call themselves "the 2600" - the frequency that the 7 year old Joe Engressia accidentally whistled into his receiver that resulted in ending a dialed phone recording.

Today there is still a way to use tones to hack the phone system that is useful to those who have had the misfortune to be the target of debt collection automated calling - or robocalls.

Simply record this tone as your message greeting and the computer dialing your number will flag it as no longer out of service. It really works.