>As there are no Shodan-like search engines for the telephone network, I needed to do the exploration myself. in the 2000's there was a massive telephone searc

>As there are no Shodan-like search engines for the telephone network, I needed to do the exploration myself. in the 2000's there was a massive telephone search engine hosted at bellsmind.net. You could find brief descriptions of hundreds of thousands of phone numbers. You could just run down a list of 800 numbers and call the ones that looked interesting. Some presented you with a new dialtone. Some played weird little jingles. Some lead you to a real person. A few were set up by phone hobbyists and let you play games. At some point the law caught up with BellsMind and the database was taken down. The whole site is gone now - even the blog. You can see remnants of that database here (just skip through time to see new stuff - the rest is mostly broken): https://web.archive.org/web/20041015131435/http://bellsmind.net:80/Engine/ListScanned.php https://web.archive.org/web/20041015131435/http://bellsmind.... EDIT: This is the page for "The 944 Project", which was a crawl of the entire 800-944-XXXX space. Easily the best list at the time. Some stuff might still be there. https://web.archive.org/web/20050125030027/http://bellsmind.net/Engine/BellsMindParseExtended.php?NPA=800&NXX=944 https://web.archive.org/web/20050125030027/http://bellsmind....