Phone Losers of America - The E-zine

The E-zine

The PLA e-zine was originally distributed electronically via a dial-up BBS, with an option to buy the magazine and have it shipped by mail. It is not recommended that anyone follow any instructions in any article, since for the most part, the humorous antics (such as Phone fraud) are illegal.

The editor of the e-zine was Brad Carter, who also went by the aliases of RBCP, RedBoxChiliPepper and Alex, the latter being his middle name. Most of the material in the e-zine was written by Brad, especially in the early issues where he was the only person contributing. Eventually he began accepting submissions from readers and the e-zine grew into a multi-article format, much like Phrack and other e-zines of that era.

Each issue of the e-zine usually centered around a single topic, such as BBS hacking, using a red box, revenge tactics, call forwarding hacking, etc. While most of the issue were informative and legitimately taught readers how to do these things, the issues were also heavy on humor and sprinkled with complete nonsense and things that would never work. Much of the fun in reading the PLA e-zine was spotting the nonsense and knowing that many people would take the ridiculous advice seriously. An example of this would be issue #33 (Issue #33, 1995), where PLA provided a phony secret code for pay phones that would cause all of the money to fall out of the change slot.