My freshman year of HS, I bought a DTMF dialer from Radio Shack. This was a small handheld device with a shallow coupler on the back, and buttons matching those

My freshman year of HS, I bought a DTMF dialer from Radio Shack. This was a small handheld device with a shallow coupler on the back, and buttons matching those on a DTMF telephone, and pressing them produced the same tones as a telephone. The dialer had a memory function. One day I noticed the tones produced by putting a quarter in a pay phone to tell the backend switch a quarter had been inserted. It was, like, beep beep beep beep beep, really fast. Dimes and nickels made the same tones, but they were shorter, less beeps. Something sounded familiar about these tones, and through trial and error, I realized these tones were made from the DTMF tones of either the asterisk key or the octothorpe key (I can't now remember which, and btw, it is not a hash symbol, it is an octothorpe). By putting enough presses of the right key into the memory of the Radio Shack dialer, I could fool payphones into thinking I had deposited quarters. I had turned my off the shelf Radio Shack DTMF dialer into a Red Box, without actually doing anything to the hardware or electronics. And it was a lot more svelte than the original Woz Red Boxes, about the size of a flip phone when closed. At first, this worked at every payphone, always, any kind of call, local or long distance. I spent a lot of time at the airport and hotel pay phone banks calling a gf long distance. But eventually, my DTMF dialer stopped fooling the switch, so I could no longer make free local calls. But with long distance calls, I'd usually get an operator once the spoofed coin inserts failed, but they would always still fool the operator, who I think assumed line interference prevented (what I assume were) the new digital switches from recognizing coin insert tones. Then that stopped working; somehow the operators knew what I was doing and would accurately describe my spoof to me. So it no longer worked with ordinary common pay phones. But I found a pay phone installation that was not ordinary, I believe it was called a "Smart Payphone," but it was not smart in the way we think of smart phones today; it just had some extra electronics and a small 3 line LCD panel which told you how long your call lasted. I could continue to make local and long distance calls from only these types of pay phones for a few more years until every place I knew there had been one had been uninstalled. It only occurred to me later that I was not stealing from AT&T or some local Bell affiliate. I had been stealing from whomever owned the pay phone, who still had to pay for those long distance calls I made. I have carried the guilt and shame of my juvenile crimes ever since. Not kidding. That was all very, very wrong.