On this week’s Brad’s Cactus Shack, we’re going to phone phreak like it’s 1995 so that we can illegally dial in to some sexy 1-900 numbers for actual real-life psychics and phone sex workers. Get ready to have your minds blown by the uncanny accuracy of psychics who use mind rays to lock in on your brain frequencies over the phone so that they can give you winning lotto numbers.
What this show is really about, though, is the two completely different methods we used to call into 1-900 numbers for free back in 2009, both which involved opening up phone boxes that us regular citizens aren’t supposed to be opening up. Special thanks to positiveandmultiple on Reddit, who first suggested that I talk about some old phreaking adventures on my show. Sorry it took me 3 years to get around to it, positiveandmultiple!
Big thanks to MC Lars for the opening song about me. MC Lars is a rapper, just like a lot of other people are, and he does live shows that you should go to and heckle him from the crowd, asking him to do the Brad Carter song. And another big thanks to Andy Anderson who recorded the sexy jobs commercial for me at the very end of the show. Andy Anderson is a professional DJ at prankcast.com, and a part-time retired sheriff for the city of Phoenix. Listen to his shows, but also say hi to him when you spot him in Phoenix hauling the bad guys away. Finally, thanks to Posy, who not only makes all of the background music you hear in this episode, but he also does the coolest YouTube videos about light and other technologies.
I tend to just assume that people know what I’m talking about when I do a show like this and I casually mention things like beige boxing as if that’s something everyone knows about in 2025. But they do not. “Beige boxing” is an old form of phreaking where you bring your own phone to a telephone box on the outside of a home or building, or one of those giant green boxes on the side of the road, and hook your phone to the wires inside so you can make free calls from phone lines that don’t belong to you. There, now you know and it will be less confusing to listen to this episode. As I was editing, I dropped in new bits of audio to clear up other things I didn’t explain well enough. Hopefully it helps.
I think when I talked about how call forwarding works with the 72# code, I was remembering how remote call forwarding used to work, where you would access the service remotely to forward your calls. By just dialing 72# from your home, you would hear the stuttering dial tone, then dial the number you wanted to forward, and then the dialed number would ring so you can let whoever it is know that you’ve just forwarded your calls to them. There was no confirmation message for that, so I apologize to Jennifer Martino who runs thisisarecording.com for yelling at you for not having those recordings. Jennifer is the girl you hear mid-show saying the funniest lines ever to a psychic as we constantly sabotage her psychic reading call. I miss you Jennifer, please come back and I’ll never pimp slap you again.
Here’s a link to my 2010 blog post about Kevin from 7-Eleven. I kept this post set to “private” for many years because I didn’t want Kevin stumbling across it and losing his mind when he confirmed that it was me. I wonder if that ever crossed his mind when his fax line failed so badly that he had to call the phone company and the cops to figure out what the problem was. And I wonder if when the home office tried to fax things to Kevin’s store, did they get charged for the calls to 1-900 psychics? Or did he completely forget about me like I did about him until I saw his full name on Jessica’s Facebook page.
I’m surprised the police in that town didn’t automatically suspect me of doing that. Back in 1996, that police department arrested me for making thousands of dollars in illegal phone calls that apparently was the weirdest thing they’d ever had to deal with. They actually thought I was tapping into the phone box of a local power company to make these free calls and staked out the telco box waiting for me to show up and plug my phone into it, but I was doing it all remotely from my house which I had to explain to them after they arrested me.
The video that I refer to use making of horrible things to do to 7-Eleven employees kept getting taken down from my YouTube accounts, so I finally gave up trying to keep it up anywhere. You can still watch it, though, by downloading the 2025 Phone Losers of America Media Pack, and then looking for the video file named Causing Problems at 7-eleven.mp4. I don’t blame people for reporting it, since one of the things we do on the video is take a box of condoms off a shelf, poke a hole through the entire box with a safety pin, and then put them back on the shelf. Hilarious, right? Don’t worry, after turning the camera off I crushed the box of condoms in my hand and tossed it into their trash can. So none of you can blame your unwanted 2000-era pregnancies on me.
