| It is 4:00 AM, you're snoring soundly in your dark, quiet | | | | quarter for each use of *67 and the costs of buying |
| bedroom when you awakened with a start. It's your | | | | the materials necessary for a number routing box |
| phone. | | | | could total in the hundreds. So prank calling became, |
| "Hello?" you say groggily. | | | | for a time, something for only the most dedicated of |
| "Hi, is your refrigerator running?" comes the query from | | | | individuals. |
| your caller. | | | | Now, with the growing ubiquity of mobile phones, caller |
| "Well, yes, unless the power is out." you truthfully | | | | ID is a thing of the past. As the counter-measures |
| respond. | | | | begin to fail, the attackers start to come back. |
| "Then you better go catch it!" comes the not-so-witty | | | | Recently, there have been more and more reports of |
| reply. | | | | people being victimized by phone pranksters at all |
| Great. | | | | hours of the morning, without any recourse or method |
| See, back when I was a teenager, I could expect to | | | | of discovering the assailant's phone number. Until now, |
| get away with a full night of phone pranking without | | | | where you can pay a small fee and utilize a reverse |
| worry of recourse. Then, in the early 1990s phone | | | | cell phone directory to trace your perpetrator's cell |
| companies developed caller ID which stymied the | | | | phone number. The sorts of sites that offer this |
| efforts of some, less dedicated hellions. Still, it was | | | | service are all over the internet, and can be found |
| possible for them to use such practices as number | | | | easily - but they are, by far, the best method this |
| routing, and *67 to block their respective phone | | | | reporter has seen for doing away with annoying prank |
| numbers from the caller ID box. Of course, these | | | | callers. |
| practices come at some expense; it would cost a | | | | |