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Phone Losers of America: The Complete Zine Collection  Introduction by RedBoxChiliPepper October 11th, 2011 Back in 1994, my friend El Jefe and I started up this little thing called the Phone Losers of America, which immediately turned into an electronic ‘zine that was distributed on bulletin board systems around the world. The PLA ’zine covered many of the topics that were popular on underground bulletin boards at the time, including computer hacking and phone phreaking. What set our ’zine aside from other similar text files was the weird humor and complete nonsense that we threw in with the otherwise informative material. Readers often had a tough time distinguishing between what was imaginary and what was real when reading the PLA ’zine. This book is a complete compilation of the PLA ’zine. The mid-90’s were a fun time for us, full of brand-new technology to play around with, making it an ideal time to write a technology ’zine in. We had cellular phones that could easily be turned into scanners so that we could listen in on other cellular phone conversations. The cordless phones in peoples’ homes could be monitored by any police scanner. Voicemail companies began popping up all over the country and a large portion of their customer base preferred to use easily-guessable PINs, making it a piece of cake to break into their accounts. Even better, the voicemail companies rarely thought to block collect and 3rd party calls to their phone lines, so we could use hacked boxes to charge all of our calls to. And the world’s largest phone company not only let us trick their pay phones with fake quarter tones, but they also began allowing us to use credit card numbers for our phone calls, with no verification whatsoever. And then the internet happened for us. PLA saw the transition of the underground moving from BBSes to this amazing new thing called The Internet, and if you pay attention you’ll notice a huge increase of internet references in the last issue compa