Show Notes

Cold Open

On November 8th, 2016 Brad Carter, or RedBoxChilliPepper as he was known online (RBCP for short), woke up early. Looking out the window of his modest home, an ominous fog blanketed the surrounding Albany, Oregon landscape. Albany was where Brad was currently calling home. He never seemed to be able to hang around anywhere too long. It’d been that way his whole life, since he first left home at 17. He sat at his workspace, booted up his computer and got down to work. 

Carter had had many jobs over the years to pay the bills but his true work, his true passion: The Phone Losers of America. Brad Carter was the creator and driving force behind the infamous and, frankly, legendary hacking group which he founded back in 1994. 

Presently, he was wrapping up editing and mixing a new episode of his PLA radio show. Over the years the Phone Losers had achieved a certain notoriety amongst hackers and the phone freak subculture. Apart from their zines and how-tos for hacking, Carter and the Phone Freaks were primarily known for their prank calls. Throughout the years, the Losers never stopped prank calling for one reason: It’s fun and funny.

It didn’t matter if it was an old lady from Indianapolis named Mildred Monday, who he pestered at least once a year, or a random Walmart, Carter just generally loved messing with people. He was putting the final touches, editing down a prank call with a hotel front desk (one of their specialties), his headphones in and a microphone plugged into his laptop to do some last minute voice overs and corrections. 

For that reason, he didn’t hear the first knock. When they banged louder, he removed his headphones, thinking he might have heard something. Dead silence until…

SFX: KNOCKING ON DOOR.

“What now?” Carter thought as he got up to go see who it was. He thought it might be his neighbor telling him to throw away his carved PLA pumpkin from Halloween. He’d been holding a PLA pumpkin photo contest on Facebook but by now, his was attracting flies.

Another banging on the door, this time much louder.

“Who is it?” he asks with his patented calm, non-threatening, almost lazy-sounding voice. It was this voice that convinced so many company employees and customers to hand over important information over the phone. The reason being, Brad sounded so much like a day laborer who didn’t really care about the information for which he was asking. Time and again, he could get video store clerks and Dominos Pizza employees to blindly offer up their customer’s addresses, and even credit card info.

“Mr. Bradley Carter?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“FBI. We have a warrant to search these premises.”

Brad stood there, shocked by this sudden turn of events. But that wasn’t all.

“We also have a warrant for your arrest.” 

Carter laughed at the way the FBI agent held off this second part. Never one to take things so serious, Brad opened the door. His shock had worn off and now his curiosity kicked in.

“So, uh, what are the charges?”

“18 U.S. Code § 1030 - Fraud and related activity in connection with computers.”

Brad wracked his brain. That could be a lot of things he’d done. He tried to focus on more recent activity. As FBI agents flowed into his house, manhandling his small-scale recording studio setup, it finally popped in his head.

“Shit. Must have been the Safeway thing.”

On this episode: Redboxing, Cacti and lots and lots of prank calls.

I’m Keith Korneluk and you’re listening to Modem Mischief.

You're listening to Modem Mischief. In this series we explore the darkest reaches of the internet. We'll take you into the minds of the world's most notorious hackers and the lives affected by them. We'll also show you places you won't find on Google and what goes on down there. This is the story of the Phone Losers of America.

Act 1

The PLA would become a cultural phenomenon in the hacker culture of the 90s. Their zine and prank calls circulated throughout BBSes, or bulletin board systems, spreading important how-to knowledge about ways to stick it to corporate America. But besides being an early source of phone phreaking for the online masses, Brad and his cohorts also provided a fun, anarchic aesthetic that appealed to the hackers and GenXers of the time.  

Their fame and notoriety would grow through the 90s and early 2000s by inserting themselves in high-profile controversies like the Jonbenet Ramsey case and creating year-spanning prank calls to certain individuals that could be counted on to react in such ridiculous ways that the results would instantly go viral before the term even existed. Carter would be featured on CNBC multiple times for his repeated hacking of Walmart intercoms.

 They would hold and be featured at multiple hacker conventions, having become early internet rockstars. The Phone Losers were an early pioneer of internet trolls and pranksters, taking every opportunity to spoof and pawn anyone they could, including their fans. You never could trust what the PLA would post. Were they sharing a hack to intercept fast food drive-thru walkies or did they just prank you into taking your toaster apart for no reason? 

Over the years there would be countless speculations and interpretations as to the actions of PLA - academics would say they were corporate terrorists, attacking the modern goliaths of our day while authority figures, conservatives  and news pundits would label them criminal miscreants, a sign of society's rapid decay. To this day Brad Carter is self-effacing about his intent. For nearly 30 years, his answer has remained the same: It's fun.

It all started in rural Illinois. A seventeen year old Brad Cooper was sitting on a hill in the middle of the night overlooking the back parking lot of the Illinois Bell Phone Company. In his hand is a RadioShack walkie-talkie.

“Hey! Are you done yet, man? I’ve been sitting here for almost an hour”

He whispers, staring down at the dumpster in the parking lot below. Just then a figure’s head pops out of the dumpster and speaks into their own walkie. Brad’s suddenly The crackles to life.

On the other end he can hear his best friend Doug’s voice.

“Five minutes tops. I’ve found something here that you’ll like. Keep a lookout when I get out.”

“Gotcha.”

Brad and Doug had been partners in crime for a few years now. He can still remember the first time one of his friends suggested they called the numbers of local pay phones. The young Carter didn’t even know you could do that. It seemed to open up mental doors that lead him down a lifelong fascination with messing with people over the phone. As his parents noticed, he became obsessed with pay phones. Whenever they were out of town on vacation, little Brad would make them stop at every payphone they came to so that he could write down the numbers as potential later victims. 

From there, they moved into prank calling. For Christmas, Brad received a TRS-80 and learned how to hardwire its speech card into his phone. He could then call pay phones and have the computer “talk” for him. It wasn’t long before moving on to phone phreaking, allowing him to make free phone calls to anywhere around the globe. The world was Brad’s prank oyster.

Then there was what they were currently up to: dumpster diving the phone company for passwords and phone numbers to modems. With these, he and Doug could log in and gain access to Illinois Bell’s computers. 

They could also use the employee id numbers and info in order to impersonate them and, using social engineering, get important information that way as well. That was Brad’s specialty. He learned early just how easy it was to manipulate someone on the other end of a phone.

Brad turned the music on his walkman up and laid back on the grass, staring up at the full moon and clouds rolling past. He planned to listen through the end of the song before sitting up and giving Doug the all clear. 

Little did Brad know that as he laid on the hill, listening to Love and Rockets, a late night dump truck pulled into the parking lot. Its metal prongs jutted out and took hold of the dumpster, lifting it, and Doug, up into the air.

Brad! Jesus! Where are you?

Doug’s voice on the walkie finally broke through Brad’s muffled headphones and he looked up just in time to see the dumpster about to be overturned. 

In an instant Brad’s up and running down the hill, waving his arms towards the garbage truck.

WAIT! THERE’S SOMEBODY IN THERE! 

He no longer cares about not getting caught. About pulling off a subversive mission in the middle of the night. Digging around a dumpster just for some stupid fucking phone records. All he cares about is stopping the truck before Doug gets crushed.

But no matter how much he waves or how loud he yells, he can’t crack the driver's attention which is focused entirely on one concept: “Get done with this shift.” That meant emptying this dumpster into his truck.  So he did.. All Brad saw was a glob of papers and trash fall from the dumpster into the compressor. Somewhere in there was Doug.

As the truck is dropping the dumpster back down on the ground, it revs up to leave. 

Brad tries the walkie again.

Doug! Doug! Can you hear me? Are you okay?

Nothing but static on the other end. Brad stood in the Bell Illinois parking lot at 3 AM completely alone and not knowing what to do next. As he recounts in the book Phone Losers of America

If the police stopped me on the way to the car I would have been incapable of lying to them. I’d confess everything. I’d tell them that we’d been stealing phone company trash and I watched my best friend get crushed to death and I did nothing to prevent it.

But the police didn’t stop him. Instead, Brad got in his car and headed for his house in nearby Alton, Illinois. Driving home, his mind raced. Should he just go home to bed then to school the next day like nothing happened? What would happen when they found the body? Eventually someone would come around to talk to Brad. It was no secret that the two were best friends.

Instead, Brad had another idea. He’d wanted to travel and see the world outside his small-town Illinois life for a long time. He had even been planning on moving to Galvenston with his highschool girlfriend after graduation up until she broke up with him a few months ago. By the time Brad arrived home, he’d made up his mind. He would use this tragic incident as a spur to push him off into the world.

As he was quietly packing for life on the road he came upon his scrapbook. 

He and Doug’s pranks and hacking over the last few years had caused so much havoc that it inspired news articles. Headlines such as: “Local Resident Hit with $50,000 Phone Bill” ,“Pay Phone Stuffing Scammers at Large” and Brad’s personal favorite “Vandals Opening Phone Boxes, Ringing up Big Charges”.

He grabbed the scrapbook, knowing that Doug had a similar one and that if the police found them, they would be tied to these crimes in no time. Before departing, Brad left a note for his parents saying, “Moving down south. Be in touch soon.” He figured if he didn’t say “I” they might figure he and Doug left together. With that, Brad hopped in his 79 Dodge Colt and headed out for a new life.

Driving south, Carter slept in his car in rest stops along the way, finally making it to the small island community of Galveston, Texas. He spent the day driving around the city, getting a lay of the land and figuring out where he was going to sleep that night. Brad had always been interested in trying out homelessness and when better than when you might be wanted by the authorities? At first he was nervous parking in the Kroger parking lot for the night but was soon at ease by all the other cars and trailers parked there. 

The next step was getting a job. While he was happy to be homeless, he didn’t want to be broke. 

What I really wanted was a cash register job inside one of the many Circle K convenience stores that were spread all over the island.  I’d seen the amount of work those clerks got away with not doing and I knew that their jobs paid quite a bit more than a restaurant job.  I wanted a piece of that.

But while he had interviews at numerous locations, he couldn’t seem to land a job. That’s when he decided to take matters into his own hands and create an opening for himself. First he decided on what location he would like to work. Naturally he decided on the beachfront location. Next, Brad got down to the surveillance part of his plan. 

He started amassing a list of all the employees that worked at that location, the cars they drove, home addresses, and phone numbers. Brad singled out Joe, as the most likely employee to get fired. From there, he nudged the process along. While the employees were busy with customers, Brad snuck in the back office and stole the employee schedule for the week.

Seeing when Joe was set to work next, Brad called him at home, pretending to be his manager.

Joe, this is Sonny.  It looks like there was a mistake in scheduling and you don’t have to come in today.  You have to be here tomorrow instead.

Brad then went to the Circle K to see if his ruse had worked. 4 o’clock came and went with no Joe. As he perused the isles, he could see the manager angrily complaining about Joe being a no-show. So far so good.

Unfortunately, the next day Joe was still working. So he ramped up his sabotage efforts. In order to find out where Joe lived, he called Dominos Pizza and asked what address they had for Joe’s phone number. With this information, he drove to Joe’s house and stuck a few nails behind the tires of car before his scheduled next shift. Driving along the route Joe would take to work, Brad could see the man cursing on the side of the road next to a flat tire.

That was the end of Joe’s career at Circle K. Unfortunately, Brad only found this out by seeing they had hired someone else in his place. So Brad set his sights on the next most-likely employees to leave: Tia and Keith.

Tia was easily stressed out, so Brad began an all-out campaign to stress her out. He would enter the store when there was a rush and quietly created messes, cutting flits in milk jugs, overflowing the coffee machines and generally spraying sticky sugary Pepsi all over the store. He would overturn the condiments at the hot-dog station. When that wasn’t enough, he decided the work environment was too comfortable.

He climbed up onto the roof one night and sabotaged he AC unit for the store. The next day it was sweltering. Using his know-how he then disabled the ATMs and phones so they would be unable to call for repairs without leaving the store.

Carter also managed to sneak into the manager’s office and whittle down all the resumes on file to just his and about 10 other less-qualified applicants, increasing his chances.

Meanwhile, Brad repeatedly prank called Keith, recording his short-tempered rants against the pranker. Editing these profanity-strewn replies into one supercut, he then called the Circle K supervisor and manager, making it seem as if Keith were cursing them both out.

Soon after this, he stopping seeing both Tia and Keith and a HELP WANTED sign appeared in the window. The next day, he had a job.

Previous to this, Brad had mainly used his hacking and social engineering skills for laughs. This was the first time he saw first-hand that there could be real-world effects from his mischief. He liked how it felt. 

After a few days of training and then working part-time in the evenings on my own, I quit.  The job sucked and I didn’t like it at all. 

Act 2

Over the next few years, Brad moves around the country, picking up menial jobs and rarely ever having a place of residence.

Being homeless gave me complete freedom, no responsibilities, I never had to be anywhere and I didn’t have to answer to anyone. 

He discovered little hacks, such as using campsites as a way to get a shower and shave and use the computers in the rec rooms. While living in Indianapolis he stumbles upon an invaluable resource for a wandering vagabond: the local university campuses. 

Eventually I found a perfect indoor home in Indianapolis - the IUPUI campus.  The entire campus seemed to be completely unlocked and unguarded all night.  Even some of the basement rooms with giant radioactive warning signs on them were unlocked.  Some nights I slept in a student lounge or in a random classroom.  I’d toss some of my books and notebooks around me, hoping to make anyone walking by think I’d just fallen asleep studying.  

As a seventeen year old, he can pass for a student at any campus. It also allowed him full access to libraries and computers. It was during this time that he became more engaged in the early internet culture and more involved in forums and BBSes or bulletin board systems. This was the internet before the internet. While Brad had run away from home, he still kept in touch with one of his oldest friends, Zak, or as he would be known on the internet, el_jefe. Zak was one of Brad’s earliest prank teammates and was his cohort in the legendary “Dino and his Cordless Phone” prank call.

Brad continued to hop around cities expanding his hacking network while Zak stayed behind in their hometown of Alton, Illinois. What both he and Zak noticed online was a certain preciousness within the hacking culture. While there was useful information in the online bulletin boards and zines about how to break into systems and other nefarious tools, they were all written in such an aggrandizing way that made the two regular midwest kids sick. As Rob T Firefly, a future member of PLA would describe the scene at the time,

 In the mid '90s, the BBS scene was still desperately trying to be all cool and underground and exclusive. Countless text files which mostly looked and sounded alike, wrapped what actual information they had in an air of forced mystery, all “we are super-elite and we grace you with this meager info because we are so much smarter and cooler than you.”  

 In 1994 Zak typed a sarcastic message on a local BBS.

Well, I’m going to start a really cool hacker group and I’m going to call us the Phone Losers of America!

While Zak was joking, Brad loved the idea. Thus began the very preliminary beginnings of Phone Losers of America. Earlier that year Carter had gained a bit of notoriety by figuring out a way to hack into any WWIV BBS, a popular brand of bulletin boards at the time. Logging in as different people, Brad was able to turn people on the boards against each other and watch the drama unfold. 

Eventually people figured out that I was responsible and everyone wanted to kill me, but then some people started begging me to teach them how to hack. 

Not wanting to paint himself as some master hacker, Brad instead wrote what would eventually be the first issue of the Phone Losers zine wherein he sets it up as if he’s going to teach everyone how to hack a BBS only for the final instructruction to be waiting till the operator leaves their house and taking an axe to their computer.

This set the template for what the Phone Losers were all about. While they might be able to bestow practical hacking wisdom, they also might just be taking the piss out of you.

In late 1994 Brad Carter moved from Oregon to Austin, Texas. This was a rare time when Carter had both a job and apartment. He continued to write issues of the PLA zine.  One of the major reasons for moving to Austin, besides the general good “Weird” vibes, was it was the home of one of the first hacking conventions in North America known as HoHoCon. Zak joined him and Carter used some of his money earned from his convenience store job to print up 1000 Phone Losers cards which they passed out all over the Ramada which hosted the convention.

While back in Illinois, Brad uploads the first 14 issues of the PLA zine to all the local Illinois BBSes he can find before returning to Austin. In Texas, Brad creates his own PLA BBS and continues to upload zine articles. These range from practical how-tos such as “How to Build a Red Box”, “Dumpster Diving & Looting Bell Trucks” to “Ruining The Life of a 7-Eleven Employee” which Carter wrote while in the middle of his shift at 7/11. 

Issue 14, Dino's Cordless Phone, featured an all-night prank marathon conducted by Brad and Zak to their dim-witted neighbor whose cordless phone they were able to listen in on using a radio scanner. Throughout the night they convince Dino his house is bugged and under surveillance, have the cops show up and take turns harassing him all to which he stays on the line and talks with them for long periods of time. Not only that, with the scanner, the two are able to hear all of the ranting calls he makes to his wife working at the nearby hospital.

This transcript is the first inkling of the recorded prank calls that would make the PLA an early celebrity of the internet and bootleg tape era of the 90s. The online boards lit up with excitement over this new, anarchic presence. Everyone reads and reposts the PLA zine. Brad had numerous people reaching out, offering articles and advice for future issues. 

Back in Illinois the PLA has also attracted attention thanks to Zak. The Belleview News Democrat, a newspaper in Belleview, Illinois became interested in the PLA, publishing two front page stories and one editorial on the rising hacker zine. It did not paint the group in a positive light. Just after Brad left Illinois for the airport, his father heard a knock on the door. Answering it, he was met by two Madison County Sheriffs looking for one Brad Carter. They had a warrant for his arrest. Brad’s father told them that their son had already left, flying back to Oregon. The police even tried to catch Carter at the St. Louis Airport but just missed him.

The PLA zine ran for two years. During that time Carter brought on many of his computer-savvy friends as collaborators. In addition to Zak or, el jeffe, there was Linear, Logic Box, Rob T. Firefly and Calimar. These would be the core members of the PLA, participating in prank calls and videos throughout the years.

On May 5th, 1997 Brad released issue 46 and announced it would be his last. The issue had a very conclusive nature to its contents, thanking all involved and tying up loose ends. One of these was finally revealing why the PLA mascot was a cactus. The source of this, like so many PLA jokes, went back to when he and his friends would prank call someone. They would only say the word ‘cactus’, phrasing it as either a question or statement.

While the zine may have been dead, Brad was far from finished creating mayhem under the PLA banner. After releasing issue 46, Carter created his first website, phonelosers.org, finally leaving the BBS technology behind. 

The website would not only act as the archive for the PLA zine. Brad’s wanted to use it as a base for other sites. He began enlisting hackers from across the internet to create their own regional PLA sites. In no time there were over 100 of these regional sites, all linked to by Brad and each one containing important hacks, phone numbers to prank and vulnerabilities in whatever city the site was based. It was an infrastructure for phone phreaks and hackers to exchange information and ideas.

While this was noble and attempt by Carter to spread free information, by the late 90s, with the dawning of internet culture and his own merchandising of CDs and tapes of his prank calls, this is ultimately what the PLA became most known for.

One of the PLA’s most famous internet feuds occurred in 1997 not long after Brad had created the website. Not only did it intercept a large-scale scandal at the time, bringing the group into larger internet life, it would also prove to be one of the earliest examples of a trend that would explode online in the years to come.

Samantha Dahl, a sometimes member of PLA going by the name Tannest, and Logic Box stumbled upon a message board known as the Boulder News Forum. Originally created for citizens of Boulder to discuss local news and happenings, in the wake of the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty pageant star at her home in Boulder, the forum quickly turned into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and bored housewives acting as amateur detectives.

The forum’s software was rudimentary. They didn’t even require members to login so you could post under whatever name you wanted. Tannest and Logic Box couldn’t believe their good fortune. They proceeded to impersonate members of the BNF, proposing the wildest of theories just to watch everyone on the forum freak out. 

Hey RBCP, take a look at this.

This has been going on for several months by the time Brad was brought on. He instantly fell in love. It was an opportunity to two things he loved. 1: Prank a group of high-minded idiots and 2: Self Promotion.

I started bringing up the PLA name as often as I could and we all began posting new theories about the murder that involved toll fraud devices called red boxes, saying that stacks of them had been found in the walls of the Ramsey home.   We also dropped names, locations and events related to the PLA 'zine. 

The result was that some members of the forum actually bought into these theories and would mention them repeatedly. When Logic Box wrote an article about the BNF on the new PLA e-zine, it brought a wave of new members to the forum, all wanting a piece of the fun.

Over the next two years, Brad and the PLA carry out a campaign of terror against the BNF, clogging the forum-ways with ridiculous notions and non-stop mention of themselves. 

The result was even funnier: members of the Bouder News Forum came to the conclusion that the PLA was working for the Ramsey family, hired to derail their important online investigation.

BNF Post by: Faith 

The good news is that an arrest is near. Then Ramsey won't be able to afford to pay the PLA anymore and they will have to get real jobs. The PLA will be known forever as losers who worked for scum. They might as well have helped twist the rope around JonBenet's neck. 

Any attempt the BNF administrator took to regulate the forum was quickly turned against them. When they started displaying the IP addresses of each member, the Phone Losers were thrilled: They could now find out the real identities of each member and with that, came phone numbers which they could prank call.

Eventually the forum stopped being about the JonBenet murder at all and became a full-scale discussion of the PLA and how they could be brought down. So naturally the PLA assisted in this, drowning the forum in false information about themselves. When the BNF members started posted trash on the PLA forum site, Brad simply modified his site’s code so anything written would get redirected to the BNF forum. 

Fighting broke out between all the BNF members, some saying they should ignore the PLA while others became obsessed. The PLA, meanwhile, ate it up. Before the forum was finally shut down, the Boulder News members became so desperate they began invoking Native American curses against the PLA. A member known as Black Wolf wrote:

You have offended me and my people with your profanity and injustices being sent out into the universe. My people have come together to place a terrible curse on you and the one you serve. You will suffer extreme embarrassment and mental anguish. We are placing this curse on various organs in your bodies. Some have to do with a sexual nature. I know you won't take this seriously. Many haven't and the results have not been pleasant. It is my obligation to foretell you of this. 

Not long after, the administrators left a message announcing they would be shutting down the forum due to negative parties posting member’s personal information and threatening them. The PLA had a good last laugh about this, considering they never actually did this. It was the sincere BNF members that posted PLA’s personal info and sent threats (and curses).

Ultimately the members of the Boulder News Forum drifted off to other online discussion sites. Brad was sad to see the fun end but got a nice surprise in 2008, eleven years after BNF was shut down. A man named Richard Cardo, claiming to be a private detective, began uploading videos to YouTube detailing his theory that Brad Carter was, in fact, the true killer of JonBenet Ramsey. What did Brad think of this?

It’s one of the greatest things to ever happen to me.

This is when the phone pranks of the Phone Losers become more important and they enter into two of their major ongoing prank attacks: first with the “elite super hacker” Curtis Lee Jones, who in reality was a man who stalked and threatened numerous women in the Oregon area. Carter had heard about Jones, found his number and began prank calling him. The Phone Losers didn’t realize how prime of a victim they had. Curtis presented himself as an elite computer hacker who already had all their information and would induce a campaign of torment against them, ruining their lives. He never did. As was the case with so many of the Loser’s victims, they talked a big game with little to no follow through.

The PLA was flying high with a growing notoriety from fans of underground hacking groups and prank calls. But how long could it last?

Act 3

With the coming of the millennium and the increased traffic on the internet, the PLA’s star was rising. Their website brought in a steady income from selling CDs of their prank calls. With the increase of streaming audio and video, younger people were turning more and more to the internet to get their fix of humorous content. PLA had it.

In the late 90s, Brad and his friend EvilCal began making short funny videos for the PLA site which they called PLA TV which became a hit in the early days of viral videos. You never knew what you were going to get, either authentic phone-fraud advice, or a prank on the viewer, getting them to disable their toaster looking for a piece that could enhance their radio-scanner abilities.

The website built up a solid fan base and listeners came to love Brad’s regular phone prank victims. There was Mildred Monday, an elderly woman from Indianapolis who would constantly exclaim:

My name is Mildred Monday!

Then there was Curtis the Super Hacker. A man who claimed to be one of the elite world hackers and would threaten Brad with extraordinary measures of cyber revenge while also making rather crude insults.

This was in addition to all the random places of business they would harass, including hotels, McDonalds and morning DJs.

In the summer of 2004, PLA hosted a 10 year anniversary panel at the  Hackers On Planet Earth convention in New York City where PLA members  Rob T Firefly, murd0c, Big-E, Judas Iscariot, and I-baLL presented key exploits of the group to an audience of a couple hundred in attendance. They would host another panel at the 2008 HOPE convention as well.

On December 22nd of 2005, Carter was featured on a CNBC’s On the Money segment on corporate terrorism in which they feature Brad and the other Phone Loser’s taking over the customer service lines and overhead intercom of the giant chain supermarket. 

I’d say more or less its pretty much all for fun. I don’t have anything personal against Walmart. I don’t like them too much but we did it all for fun.

In 2006, PLA Radio was launched, wading into the podcast world and featuring weekly phone pranks, skits and tutorials on underground DIY topics. 

And in 2009, Carter was given 2 hours air time on a New York radio station for which he created The Phone Show wherein he and logic would take calls and discuss PLA topics. 

Despite all the mainstream attention, Brad and the PLA were always an element that existed on the fringe and the outskirts of the law. Carter began engaging in credit card fraud in his late teens and early on figured out a scheme to fly for free. Brad had compiled a long list of stolen credit card numbers from various sources, including friends, dumpster diving and even from places he worked. In the 90s it was easy to book a flight through a travel agency then go in and pick up the tickets without even ever having to show ID. Pre-9/11 you didn’t even need to show ID to get through security.

Carter was finally caught when repeated credit cards he was trying to use had been canceled and when he went into the travel agency, the police were waiting for him. As Carter recounts, they detained him for a few days then let him go, deciding he wasn’t worth the price of prosecution.

From there, Brad elevated his fraud game, using social engineering to get numbers. He would call a place of business, pretending to be the credit card company and get the employee to read off credit card information. With his illegally purchased laptop and a program called CMaster 3 which used an algorithm that generated valid credit card numbers. He would order tons of items over the phone, mostly tech, sometimes selling them for cash or holding onto them.

Ultimately, Brad got caught making illegal calls on his cell phone, only having to pay a small fine. He says in his book that nearly all of these tactics are outdated and does not recommend doing them.

Ironically, the most trouble Brad ever got in with the law had nothing to do with his credit card fraud but with his career as a prank caller. In 2016, a redditor started providing Carter with employee logins for the national grocery store Safeway. Unlike his earlier credit card fraud, Carter merely used this information for his prank call Youtube page.

With access to the customer satisfaction surveys, Carter would pose as a store manager and call the customer, and make up stuff about the consumer's complaint, according to investigators. He called customers from Massachusetts to Texas, California, Oregon and Washington.

When a customer complained about a store's remodel and the moving of a Starbucks kiosk to the back of the store, Carter suggested the customer could stand to lose a few extra pounds with the extra walk. In another call, Carter spoke to a customer who had complained that the meats advertised are never available for sale in the store. Carter assured the customers that the meats are in the back, but only for really good customers.

Safeway ultimately had to shut down 2300 customer service lines in the wake of the breach.

Because he stole info from multiple states, unbeknownst to Carter, he had committed a federal offense. So on November 8th, 2016 he was arrested. Standing in open court, Brad plead guilty to the charges,

I'm sorry I wasted the court's resources on something like this. "I realize what I did was wrong.

U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez gave Carter, sandwiched between his two lawyers, a stern sidelong glance, staring him down with obvious contempt.

Mr. Carter, do you know who is in federal prison ... what happens to people like you in federal prison?

Carter nodded.

You think you know what's in there. But you don't.

All Brad could say was,

I made a mistake.

The fear you’re feeling at this moment, with your heart beating rapidly, wondering if you’ll get a federal prison sentence. That’s how your victims felt. You put that out there for the rest of the world to see and enjoy and laugh at. What do you think about putting things out there that humiliate people?

I shouldn't have done that. I'm very sorry.

If I was still serving as a state judge and you came before me with this type of offense, I wouldn't hesitate to order you serve up to 90 days in a community jail

Just as Brad always managed to eke out of too much trouble, the federal charge ultimately worked in his favor because federal courts have limits to what sort of judgements they can hand down. Ultimately, Carter received house arrest and 5 years probation, 250 hours of community service and a 20 thousand dollar fine. 

In an interview on the Right Where You are Sitting Now podcast, Carter had this to say to all his critics:

We never said we were good people.

Act 4

Since Carter’s arrest, not much has changed. Still living a quiet life in Oregon, although now he’s technically considered a convicted federal felon. Otherwise he’s still just doing what he loves: prank calls and causing havoc. He no longer posts incriminating videos on his personal YouTube page. He still runs the PLA website in addition to multiple podcasts. The Phone Show is still going strong and he still performs pranks as often as he can. In 2018, Carter uploaded a video on his Facebook page of him and a few other PLA cohorts dawning Walmart vests and went around the store pretending to be employees, giving customers wrong information and even getting into arguments before security kicked them out.

The other PLA members continue to engage in some of Brad’s phone pranks and online shenanigans. Rob T Firefly has become a community activist in New York, also writing plays and podcasts. Some of the other members have branched off as well into their own podcasts. Logic Box, one of the originators of the BNF trolling started the notable GeekBox.

In 2010 Carter published the official Phone Losers of America book in which he recounts his early years of living as a homeless hacker, the rise of the PLA and some of their more famous exploits. This is where he divulged his most harrowing story of seeing his friend Doug horribly crushed to death in a garbage truck. In fact, compared to the rest of the book’s lighthearted tone, it feels a bit out of place.

So whatever happened with Doug and Brad’s run from the law. Well, in the final chapter of the book, Brad details a rather overly dramatic encounter with Doug who actually escaped the truck and spent years tracking Brad to enact revenge before throwing Doug out of a moving van. The book ends with Brad’s classic nonchalant attitude of going back to a payphone to try out his new red boxing device. Did any of that really happen? Well, after hearing this episode of Brad’s penchant for fucking with people, we’ll let you be the judge.

Brad Carter’s still out there, still doing what he loves for the pure reason that it’s fun.So be careful the next time you get a call from an unknown number. It might be one of the Losers on the other line.

I’m Keith Korneluk, and you’re listening to Modem Mischief. 

CREDITS

Thanks for listening to Modem Mischief. Don’t forget to hit the subscribe or follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss an episode. This show is an independent production and is wholly supported by you, our listeners and the best way to support the show is to share it. And another way to support us is on Patreon or as a paid subscription on Apple Podcasts. For as little as $5 a month you’ll receive an ad-free version of the show plus bonus episodes exclusive to subscribers. If comfy tees, dope coffee cups or hoodies is your thing, check out our merch store. Modem Mischief is brought to you by Mad Dragon Productions and is created, produced and hosted by me: Keith Korneluk. This episode is written and researched by Ed Leer. Edited, mixed and mastered by Greg Bernhard aka Sir Gregor the Very Small. The theme song “You Are Digital” is composed by Computerbandit. Sources for this episode are available on our website at modemmischief.com. And don’t forget to follow us on social media at @modemmischief. Thanks for listening!