![]() ![]() Or simply ride in the elevator, hit the button, and impersonate an elevator technician who needs to know the line's number.Ĭaruana and other phreakers warned me that it's not just elevator phones that are potentially open to unwelcome calls. Open an elevator phone cabinet, attach alligator clips to the phone line, connect your own phone, and call 1-80, which reads your number back to you. Since then, Caruana has learned the tricks to identify those secret elevator phone numbers, some of which have been used by phreakers for at least 20 years: Call sequential numbers left out of a building's directory to guess the ones that might be elevators. I didn’t understand it, I had no idea what was going on, and I wanted to learn more." "You hear that weird echo, those odd menus," Caruana says. He says he first became aware of that community when he was on a conference call with a group of half a dozen phreakers a year ago, and one of them added an elevator to the call. I got no answer except what sounded like the rumble of the door opening and closing again.Ĭaruana takes pains to emphasize that the community of elevator phone phreakers he knows personally focuses entirely on exploration and harmless absurdity. Sounding a little more excited than I intended, I asked if anyone was in an emergency situation, a strange question I felt compelled to lead with, to make sure I wasn't tying up the elevator's phone line when the occupants might need it. This time I heard a few muffled voices, then a woman answered: "There are people in here, yes." I heard a chime, perhaps a signal that it had reached a floor, followed by the rumble of what might have been a door opening. After just one ring I heard a series of four tones and was immediately listening to the inside of another elevator. ![]() I hung up and tried another number on my list: A Hilton hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. "Hello, can anyone hear me?" I asked the void. ![]() When I did, I was suddenly in aural space filled with the hum of motors and the muffled twanging of steel cables under tension. The first time I called into an elevator, I picked up my iPhone and dialed the number-labeled on my list as the Crown Plaza Hotel in Chicago-and immediately heard two beeps, then a recording of a woman's voice, who told me to press one to talk. ![]()
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