What does it take to make an original prank call? Apparently just a puppet and the number to a pharmacy. I found this prank call very original, and entertaining. This guys does a GREAT elmo impression. Listen in as, Elmo, calls the Pharmacy, undoubtedly Spoofing his number with the elmo phone....: Fisher-Price Sesame Street Elmo Knows Your Name Cell Phone

So these guys used Caller ID Spoofing to impersonate a school district. The premise is this: Ellen Degenerous is opening a brand new elementary school within their district -- staffed with an entirely gay and lesbian teachers. Watch as the fun ensues.

What makes for a great prank call? When the other people believe what it is you are trying to tell them. Think about the funniest prank calls you've ever heard. Hint: They probably didn't begin with "Is your refrigerator running?"

This is pretty rudimentary, but a classic. Call someone up once or twice a day as different people, each person asking for the same person. Example: Person 1: Is Tim there? The Mark: No... There is no tom here. Person 1: Can You just tell him, Rob called? *Click* Person 2: (With an accent) Is Timothy there? The Mark: No, No tim here. Person 2: Well, if he is, just let him know I'm looking for him. After about a week of this, call up as Tim, and let the fun begin.

This is 7:00 minutes of messing with a television preacher. He completely dissasembles this guy with all his sinning.

Sure you can call people and say funny things; so can one hundred thousand other people. But what if you could have people call you to say funny things to?! Enter: Call Forwarding. Ever had a girl be a total whore to you? How about that guy cock blocking you asking for your phone number so he can come to your party tomorrow? These people deserve a special kind of punishment. Enter: Call Forwarding. *72 Activate Call Forwarding *73 DeActivate Call Forwarding I'll let you come up with some more advanced evil tactics but consider the following: You borrow someone's phone under the pretense of giving them your number. You type in: *72 + Your Number, and hit send. Now, every call that they get, will come directly to you. Better evn, with Fake Caller ID services like SpoofCard, you can CALL BACK from the very number you are spoofing. Talk about total impersonation ... Very tricky tricky.

If you're just doing regular prank calls from domestic residence to another you can dial *67 to hide your phone number. This is a FREE service that is put in place to encourage privacy in the telephone system. Conversely, when you're NOT making crank calls, someone might tell you to dial *82. *82 is to DISABLE your privacy and show the number you're calling from to the recipient. If you like making funny phone calls, STAY AWAY FROM *82 like the plague. Even though *67 is usually pretty effective, it is only a superficial means of hiding your identity. If you really want to hide your identity, of even change it, you need a service like SpoofCard which is like .06c / minute. (A small price to pay...)

Caller ID spoofing is fooling the computer network the runs the telephone system to show a number on the receivers caller ID display which isn't the number actually associated with the originating line.  Caller ID spoofing can make a call appear to have come from any phone number the caller wishes. People have often misplaced trust in the caller id system and spoofing can call the system's value into question.

From How Stuff Works: "If you have a Caller ID box attached to your phone, then an amazing thing happens every time your phone rings -- the number (and sometimes even the name) of the calling party appears on the display right after the first ring! It turns out that the process of making the caller ID display possible is remarkably simple at your end of the line. If you have read the HSW article entitled How Modems Work, then you know that the early modems used a technique called Frequency Shift Keying to transmit bits over a phone line. FSK is extremely simple: One tone (or frequency, like 1,200 Hertz) represents a binary 1, while another tone (like 2,200 Hertz) represents a binary zero. A modem changes frequencies depending on whether it wants to send a 1 or a 0. How quickly it changes frequencies determines the speed, or baud rate, of the modem. To send caller ID information you your home, the phone company uses an FSK technique identical to a 1,200 baud modem and it sends ASCII character data to the caller ID box. The modem message is sent between the first and second ring (see How Telephones Work for a description of how the ring signal works). So the phone rings once, and if you could listen to the phone line just after that ring, you would hear a "bleeeep" sound about half a second long. If you decoded the bleep, you would find that it contains (in the simpler of the caller ID systems):

• A series of alternating 1s and 0s to help the caller ID box get the timing down
• A series of 180 1s
• A byte representing the type of message
• A byte representing the length of the message
• Month, day, hour and minute, each represented with a pair of bytes
• The 10 digit phone number in 10 bytes
• A checksum byte

There is also a more advanced system that contains the caller's name, etc., but its technique is identical (see the second link below for details). Each character is sent as a standard 8-bit ASCII character preceded by a "0" start bit and followed by a "1" stop bit. The caller ID box contains a modem to decode the bits, a little circuit to detect a ring signal, and a simple processor to drive the display. That's really all there is to the whole thing! For more information and links to related articles, see the next page. "