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The 'pay phone bandit' who baffled the FBI in the '80s
- jonhohle 2y agoNow I want to see how long it takes Lock Picking Lawyer. Someone mail him a pay phone with a bottle of booze in the coin box!
- Animats 2y agoAbout two minutes.[1] It's a disk detainer lock, which requires specialized tools, and it unlocks counterclockwise, which is unusual. The tool: [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQxVG-Munqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQxVG-Munqw [2] https://www.sparrowslockpicks.com/products/sparrows-disc-pick https://www.sparrowslockpicks.com/products/sparrows-disc-pic...
- Animats 2y agoCorrection: that's the lock on the GTE clone of the Western Electric payphone. The actual Western Electric version used an unusual lever lock. The later variant, the 30C, is claimed to have never been picked. That's a really good lock design. It's simple, robust, and immune to standard picking techniques. But there is a vulnerability. The blocking wedge, which is only supposed to move along one axis, has some mechanical slop. See [2]. So it's possible to get some feedback on which levers are blocking bolt movement. It's still a huge pain to pick. [1] https://www.mattblaze.org/photos/misc/wecolock/ https://www.mattblaze.org/photos/misc/wecolock/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXLhCvUgDYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXLhCvUgDYQ
- Algemarin 2y agoHere's the America's Most Wanted segment about the guy, James Clark, from 1988: https://youtu.be/e56gA8NBXuQ?t=1204 https://youtu.be/e56gA8NBXuQ?t=1204
- xp84 2y agoThe details about this guy at the end were hilarious. Apparently he always stays at Motel 6 and eats at 7-11. Totally living it up on Ma Bell’s dime, I see!
- thedrexster 2y agoMa Bell's _quarters_, you mean. :)
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y agoOnly for the kids. Where do you think "dropping a dime on someone" came from?
- macintux 2y agoI vaguely recall visiting Boston c1990 and discovering pay phone calls there were still 10¢, while they had been 25¢ in Indiana as long as I could remember. I'd be curious when and where the last ten-cent phone call was made.
- yial 2y agoChat GPT says Emerson Nebraska had one until 2015. But I cannot find any source to back this up. Reliable sources seem to say around 1985/1986 prices increased. I feel like if that’s true, 2600 must have a photo, right?
- Scoundreller 2y ago> Though it’s hard to imagine today, there was once a time when making a telephone call meant going home, asking to use someone’s phone, or plunking a quarter into a freestanding pay phone Pfffft, what about the classic: "You have a collect call from PICKMEUPATBILL'S" ?
- Algemarin 2y agoah yes, passed around countless txtfilez in the '90s... http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CALLATT.TXT http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CALLATT.... http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CCF.TXT http://cd.textfiles.com/hackersencyc/PHREAK/GENERAL/CCF.TXT
- lagniappe 2y agoCan't forget about his uncle Bobwehadababy Itsaboy
- pimlottc 2y agoThe classic Geico commmercial: https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs?si=imqYkQjwxpATH1VH https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs?si=imqYkQjwxpATH1VH
- monero-xmr 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoWas expecting more phreaking from this story
- imglorp 2y agoI don't think you could get cash from a payphone by phreaking, back in the day. At most you could get back the coins you put in. After each call, the coins dropped into the lock box. Phreaking was more about sending tones to the CO.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoof course not, phreaking/boxing etc was about avoiding the cash altogether! Just a note that seeing a title about pay phone antics I expected/hoped for more of a hacking angle. Good throwback story nonetheless!
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoSometime in the 80s we happened across a payphone that was spitting out quarters from the change return, partially jamming the return door in the process. Until then I always assumed that change was held in some kind of side compartment so the same coins inserted could be returned but either someone went crazy jamming it up with quarters earlier or there was a way for the payphone to make change. Wonder if the guy ever thought about running a video arcade or laundromat. It would have been a great way to cover up his source of so many quarters and convert some of them into paper currency in the process.
- edgineer 2y agoMaybe someone put gum/something to block return coins. Then as people used the machine, the return coins built up. Usually the thief would return days later and remove the gum, along with the coins behind it.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoBased on what others have said about how the coin mechanism works, this seems like the most likely explanation. Now it has me wondering if it was my brother who set it up. The payphone was outside a bar in an area I'd never been to before and I can't remember why we ended up there that day. Perhaps he was jamming up phones and then returning later to collect to proceeds. He was always getting into such small time schemes before he got mostly straightened out in the military.
- jim_lawless 2y agoI'd read a story a while back about a phone company employee who serviced payphones. He would periodically shut off power to payphones on his route, causing them to trap whatever coins the callers would insert. He'd return at a later time, turning the power back on. The coin return would then empty and he'd get the coins.
- akira2501 2y ago> He would periodically shut off power to payphones on his route Pay phones do not require an external source of power to operate the line or the internal phone mechanisms. > causing them to trap whatever coins the callers would insert It's been a while, but my recollection is that if the coin relay loses power it should return the coins to the user immediately. This is why the Green Box and shorting diodes would work. > He'd return at a later time, turning the power back on. The coin return would then empty and he'd get the coins. It's interesting how people will try to turn stories of petty theft into clever achievements.
- johnnyApplePRNG 2y ago>By one estimate, he hit phones in 30 of them, Wouldn't they know exactly how many states he did this in since he was the only one that knew how to do it?
- toast0 2y agoProbably not all instances of non-violent coin (and coin box) theft were recorded or assigned to him. Some instances could have been theft by employees or the coin box was inadverdently not returned, or needed replacement but a replacement wasn't available. Post AT&T breakup means the phone companies were less centralized and organized, presumably, than if this had happened in the 1970s.
- wintermutestwin 2y agoOn a related note, I remember in the 80s, coin fed parking meters in Berkeley were systematically cut off. I never knew if it was simple thievery, or some anarchy protest.
- user3939382 2y agoIt was Cool Hand Luke
- liendolucas 2y agoI love these stories to be shared here on HN. There was one also submitted some time ago about a cyclist who wouldn't make it into the olympics (or something like that) and started to rob banks and used his cyclist skills to escape. If I recalled correctly this was in the 80' or 90' and he used to give away the stolen money. Shame I don't have link.
- thirdsun 2y agoI remember this story being released by Epic Magazine and Chicago Magazine. The Bicycle Thief: https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/february-2019/bicycle-bank-robber-tom-justice/ https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/february-2019/bi... On a sidenote: Epic Magazine is a treasure trove of these strange, little, Coen-brothers-movie-like stories: https://epicmagazine.com/ https://epicmagazine.com/
- orzig 2y agoOne of the best uses of Perplexity.ai! Pasted your text https://www.bicycling.com/news/a26081001/cyclist-turned-bank-robber-tom-justice/ https://www.bicycling.com/news/a26081001/cyclist-turned-bank...
- pimlottc 2y agoYou can just Google for “cyclist who robbed banks”, AI isn’t really necessary for this.
- redeux 2y agoYou can just use Gopher, you don’t need Google for this. I’m being flippant, obviously but my point is that every now and then a new technology comes along that supplants and older one because it offers a meaningful improvement over the last. AI search vs traditional web search is definitely one of those.
- bongo1000 2y agoWhich is not the case here -- just simply "googling" would provide the right answer.
- VariableStar 2y agoNot condoning his actions, but "a thinker and doer" is certainly a fitting eulogy, and not a bad one to have in ones grave.
- ProjectArcturis 2y agoSeems like the hardest part would be getting rid of all the coins. I'm not surprised he got caught, given two appearances on America's Most Wanted, and his tendency to pay for hotel rooms with rolls of quarters. As another comment noted, perhaps he should have opened a laundromat or video arcade to launder the stolen money.
- firesteelrain 2y agoShould have taken them to a bank, converted to cash and then done what you said.
- alrighty 2y agoI wonder why the method was to take the box rather than replacing it after emptying it. Would that have made the crime harder to detect?
- spdif899 2y agoYeah it seems like the same heist but leaving a random handful of coins behind in the box would have been much more difficult to detect
- Pixelbrick 2y agoInspiration for Bruce Sterling's short 'Jim & Irene!'
- metadat 2y agoWhy didn't he replace the coin box with a previously obtained, now empty, coin box? Then they'd never really know if they'd been hit... much harder to tell.
- memcg 2y agoAlso on HN today: Adding a USB Port to the ThinkPad X1 Nano, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40833960 , https://jcs.org/2024/05/29/x1usb# https://jcs.org/2024/05/29/x1usb# Which lead me to see what else the author has written: https://jcs.org/projects https://jcs.org/projects -> https://github.com/jcs/payphone https://github.com/jcs/payphone Payphone Project 'These are some notes from my project to install a working payphone in my home and configure it to make and receive calls through an Asterisk PBX.
- franga2000 2y agoTinkering with payphones is a lot of fun! Some of the later designs were quite advanced - the ones I have can dial into the exchange with a modem to report detected faults, submit their earnings and even download the latest tariffs every night. This was all done on just the power from the phone line and with late 80s tech. The server software, that we're now trying to revive, has some kind of bespoke distributed database to sync between regional exchanges but also work independently of one another. [] And there are some many fun and stupid things you can do with them! We set up one at uni can tell you what's for lunch at the cafeteria, connect to a voice chat on Discord, print an LLM summary of your phone call on a receipt... [] For anyone for whom the above sounds familiar, no, it's not a Nortel Millenium, although we do also have two of those. They were made by Iskra Terminals from Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) and had this functionality at least 10 years before Nortel and the rest. If anyone is particularly interested in payphone shenanigans, shoot me an email (in bio)
- Zod666 2y agoI love stories like this. Just thinking of out with the old, it mentions there are only 100,000 payphones left in america from 2 million. Is there any value in maintaining payphones or will they all ultimately go? I dunno, it seems of value for emergencies, say one gets into an accident late and night and your phone is damaged, a payphone was impretty much in walking distance, now not so much. Same with copper landlines. My mom still uses an old school phone that doesn't need power. A bad storm hit a few years back and everyone was without power for three days, but my mom still had phone access, unlike the rest of us scrambling to charge our phones. It was the most reliable communications network we made and to just let it go seems wrong.
- brokenmachine 2y agoIn Australia they became free to use. Some of them have free wifi as well. https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/payphones-free-for-calls-australia https://www.telstra.com.au/exchange/payphones-free-for-calls...