CHEATING THE TELEPHONE

Dominion, Volume 24, Issue 62, 6 December 1930, Page 21

CHEATING THE TELEPHONE

Call Box Frauds - Telephone cheats have been very active in the West Riding of Yorkshire, lately, but a Post Oflice engineer states that following the receipt of many complaints, the mechanism of the prepayment call kiosks has been satisfactorily altered to put a stop to this trickery. As soon as the caller hears the voice of the person be has dialled he must press the button “A” to drop the call money into the box. Certain persons, however, have avoided this by speaking down the receiver and then replacing it to the gear to get a reply. Afterwards they' have pressed button “B” and got their pennies back. “In the old coin boxes,” the engineer added, “hairpins were used to deceive the operators into thinking money had been put in. This was done by pressing the hairpin on the buzzer inside, and sometihmes the dodger even went so far as to make the noise himself with his mouth.” The authorities first became aware of these cheats through a bookmaker’s agent boasting about his success at the game in a hostelry, when a plain-clothes detective was present.