The Wiki Man: Anyone can be a phone hacker

To play this joke, you need a friend who’s flying abroad.

To play this joke, you need a friend who’s flying abroad. Just log on to any website that allows you to send anonymous texts and, while the friend is in mid-flight, send an SMS to his phone (let’s assume he is landing in Cape Town) along the following lines: ‘Vodacom international roaming service welcomes you to South Africa. For emergencies dial 112. For voicemail dial 191, you fat beardie twat.’ Obviously it adds to the general hilarity here if the person receiving this is bearded and fat. (Male is preferable, too, as women are all too liable to take offence.)

Now I’m not saying this is the funniest gag in the world, but it still amuses me from time to time, one in a line of telephone-enabled jokes stretching from the first days of telephony (‘get off the line, there’s a train coming’) to Channel 4’s magnificent Fonejacker. It’s nothing new. The Bell Company’s decision to stop hiring teenage boys to operate its manual exchanges was made in part because women were less inclined to play practical jokes.

As telephone equipment gets more complex, opportunities for this kind of thing have multiplied. Our office now has those fancy IP-enabled telephone handsets, which you can control remotely via the web. When programming the ‘quick-dial’ numbers which appear on the screen on my phone, it occurred to me that it was fantastically unlikely anyone else would have changed the default PIN for their phone (usually 1234 or 0000). This allowed me to alter colleagues’ telephones so that, instead of boring and worthy numbers such as ‘Home’, ‘Important Client’, ‘Jolyon (School)’, or ‘Gym’ their phones displayed more interesting quick-dial numbers — ‘Spearmint Rhino, Prague’, or simply ‘Monique’ (it is impossible for anyone to have an innocent relationship with someone called Monique).