A prank call (also known as a crank call, a hoax call, or a goof call) is a telephone call intended by the caller as a practical joke played on the person answering. It is often a type of nuisance call and can be illegal under certain circumstances. Recordings of prank phone calls became a staple of the obscure and amusing cassette tapes traded among musicians, sound engineers, and media traders in the United States from the late 1970s. Among the most famous and earliest recorded prank calls are the Tube Bar prank calls tapes, which centered on Louis "Red" Deutsch. Comedian Jerry Lewis was an incorrigible phone prankster, and recordings of his hijinks, dating from the 1960s and possibly earlier, still circulate to this day. One victim of prank callers was Elizabeth II, who was fooled by Canadian DJ Pierre Brassard posing as Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, asking her to record a speech in support of Canadian unity ahead of the 1995 Quebec referendum. Another example is that of the prank calls made by the Miami-based radio station Radio El Zol. In one such call, they telephoned Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and spoke to him pretending to be Cuban president Fidel Castro. They later reversed the prank, calling Castro and pretending to be Chávez. Castro began swearing at the pranksters live on air after they revealed themselves.
Early examples British physicist R. V. Jones recorded two early examples of prank calls in his 1978 memoir Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945. The first was by Carl Bosch, a physicist and refugee from Nazi Germany, who in about 1933 persuaded a newspaper journalist that he could see his actions through the telephone (rather than, as was the case, from the window of his laboratory through the window of the journalist's flat). The second was by Jones in about the same year at Oxford University, pretending to be a telephone engineer, convinced a chemistry research student that there was a fault with his telephone. The student was persuaded to do such things as sing loudly into the telephone, and hold it by the flex while standing first on one leg then on the other. He finally had to be physically restrained by one of Jones' colleagues (who was in on the joke) from lowering it into a bucket of water.
Anonymity
Prank callers can now be easily found through caller ID, so it is often asserted that since the 1990s, prank calls have been harder to accomplish and thus waning in popularity. Most telephone companies permit callers to withhold the identifying information from calls using a vertical service code that blocks the caller's ID (*67 in North America, 141 in the UK), but potential victims may be reluctant to answer a call from an ID-blocked number. Wiretapping by several governments have also made prank calls easier to trace. Callers can also call from payphones in order to hide their identity, although this is becoming less common as pay phones began to phase out in the 2000s. The advent and advancements in digital switching technologies such as those found in SS7, unspoofable ANI, as well as outbound and inbound calls being logged at carrier exchange equipment, further complicate the pranksters will to remain anonymous while carrying out such activities. Another increasingly popular option is to use some form of VoIP. With some VoIP services, the telephone number will simply not exist. These calls are extremely difficult to trace since they may pass through servers and routers operated by multiple corporations or entities in various countries. Although law enforcement agencies may theoretically be able to find where a VoIP call originates from if they tried, in practice, the amount of time, effort, and resources required would be too significant to use on ordinary prank calls.
Political leaders Sometimes, prank callers are able to connect with political leaders. In December 2005, a commercially operated radio station in Spain (COPE – owned by a series of institutions affiliated with the Catholic Church) played a prank on Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales. The hoaxster pretended to be Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, congratulating Morales on his election and saying things like, "I imagine the only one not to have called you was George Bush. I've been here two years and he still hasn't called me". In an inversion of the typical pattern, in 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny used a prank call to convince an FSB agent to admit poisoning Navalny earlier that year. George W. Bush was prank called by two Russian citizens in 2022; during this call, Bush stated, "I wanted Ukraine into NATO."
Prank calls and the Internet
Ever since the opportunity has been available, there have been multiple internet radio stations dedicated to prank calls. Most of them feature a so-called "rotation" of prank calls, which is a constant broadcast of various prank calls submitted by the community, usually streamed from a SHOUTcast server host. Software such as Ventrilo has allowed prank calls to be carried out to a more private user-base, however, in real-time. The internet has allowed many people to share their own personal prank calls and develop into communities. Prank calls can be carried out in many ways; live or pre-recorded. Web platforms such as Prankcast.com allow show hosts like Phone Losers of America to send live show alerts to their followers and broadcast prank calls live to their listeners, who can also chat with the host and discuss on-goings in real-time. The use of social networking and the popularity of user generated content also allows these prank calls to spread and popularity to grow. A flaw of Craigslist and other social media sites is that it allows one to post telephone numbers without a means of confirming they own the number. A common ruse to generate prank calls is to post someone's name and phone number in an enticing Craigslist post. If this is done in a location with a different time zone than the victim, the victim may receive large number of phone calls at an inconvenient time. Craigslist, and many other sites, have a policy of not releasing the identity of the original poster without a court order. In Washington state, one cannot file an anti-harassment order against an anonymous person, leading to a catch-22 situation.
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