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This trick worked in Telefonica's phone booths in Spain in the 90s too :-)

I remember when Verizon phone booths in the US started accepting the credit cards, for a while they would accept any 16-digit number with a valid IIN that passed the Luhn check.

Toronto’s parking meter boxes were like this. They just had GPRS so they’d do an overnight dump (possibly a part of their data deal with the telecom back when data was actually saturated during the day).

So people were using cancelled or empty prepaid visa/mastercards.

Initially they’d just push out blacklists.

Once they really caught on, they did a firmware upgrade to do online verification and it took fooooreeeeveeeeerrrrr to do a credit card purchase.

I vaguely remember (sometime in the 80s) sticking a straightened paperclip into a small hole on the face of a payphone to avoid having to drop a dime / quarters, and being able to call anywhere.

If I recall, you’d stick the straightened paperclip into one of the holes on the mouthpiece and touch the other end of the paperclip to some metal part on main phone body.

War Games used a pull tab from an aluminum can to a similar effect?

(It’s been a while.)

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