rSlash - r/Prorevenge I Shut Down an Entire Radio Station

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

0:00 Intro 0:06 Prank call 9:24 Annoyed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. New episodes week over week, watch the Hulu Original Original series Furious. Now streaming only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Welcome to R slash pro revenge, where OP takes down a radio station. Our next Reddit post is from Biper. I was living in San Francisco for several months working temporary duty for my company and was

preparing for work on the day in question. As was my custom, I was getting dressed listening to the morning radio show on a local station. The station's jocks had started doing something called the Monday morning wake-up call, where on the first day of the week, they would make a prank call on the air to a victim chosen from write-in suggestions from the listening audience. Doing this was actually very controversial in radio circles at the time. I'd been a radio DJ in my hometown for a few years, and there are rules you must follow. One of the biggest rules is that you can't make a false or deceptive radio transmission, like announcing an emergency, sending an SOS or for help or other such deceptions. Doing so is a federal offense. You can lose your license and be

fined or even get jail time. It's a big no-no. The debate has long since been decided, but at the time doing prank calls on the air was a gray area. There were people who were sure it constituted a false transmission and some stations refused to do it. This argument was still alive at the time this happened. So it was Monday, and the intended victim had been nominated by her husband. They'd experienced a power failure at home earlier in the week, and the husband's suggestion was that the station call his wife, claimed to be from the utility, and tell her that the power outage was somehow their fault, and they would have to pay for it. The station staff loved the idea, and they proceeded to call the wife at her place of employment a local bank. The victim answered,

and the prank began. is this Mrs. Victim, I'm John Doe from Area Power Company. Do you remember having a power failure earlier this week? Well, it was due to a blown transformer on your block, and we've determined that the cause is a wiring fault in your house. We may have to cut off your power until you get it fixed. Also, you'll be charged for the transformer. The total cost is such and such thousand dollars. Would you prefer that we put that on your utility bill, or would you want to make other arrangements to pay? As you might imagine, the woman was shocked, then scared. As she asked for more information, having trouble believing that they were going to have to pay thousands of dollars,

she got increasingly more upset. This igged the radio staff on. The guy making the call kept increasing the pressure on her more and more, eventually telling her that her power would likely be cut off until payment was made, and that there might be a lawsuit. After several minutes, she suddenly hung up in tears. The DJ called her back, and when she heard his voice, she hung up again, crying even harder. This time, the DJ waited a minute and then called back again.

Another lady answered the phone, a co-worker, and the DJ asked to speak to Mrs. Victim. When the coworker asked his name, he replied, This is name, the name of her husband, which was a very distinctive first name. The co-worker cursed at him, called him a liar, and hung up. The radio studio was filled with laughter. The jocks thought that it was hilarious. They took calls from listeners who were all laughing and talking about what a great prank it was. They finally got the husband on the phone, he of the distinctive name.

And he was also laughing and joking that he'd surely be sleeping on the sofa tonight. He was congratulating the radio staff on the fine job they'd done, terrorizing his wife. The radio hosts promised the listening audience that because the prank was so funny, they would certainly be playing the whole recorded prank again at noon. So be sure to be listening and call your friends. I, in my efficiency apartment, listening to this, was getting mad. I was still pretty newly married and couldn't imagine doing something like that to my wife. All I could think of while the staff and listeners on the radio were laughing

was that a few miles away, a young woman was in the ladies' room crying, probably with co-workers trying to calm her down. What made it worse to my mind was that the guy who set her up for this was the one guy in the world who should have her back, her husband. Anger turned to resolve. Resolve formed a plan. I grabbed my city phone book, remember it's the 80s, and looked up two phone numbers. I called the first one. You may remember that I said that I'd been a radio disc jockey myself. It was a tiny dawn-to-dusk station, but I knew how stations worked. I knew what they liked, and more to the point, I knew what they did not like. I'd also done a lot of voiceover work and could sound professional as hell. The phone rang and was answered, you've reached such and such

radio. I launched my attack. Using my professional voice, I said, yes, this is George Smith from the San Francisco Office of the Federal Communications Commission. I've been getting some disturbing calls about your morning radio show, and I need to speak to your program director to discuss it. Uh, he's, uh, he's not, um, here right now. Let me get you someone else. I was put on hold after a few minutes. Hi, um, hello, this is radio guy number two. Um, you're from the FCC? Yes, this is George Smith from the San Francisco Office of the Federal Communications Commission. As I told your co-worker, I've been getting some disturbing calls about your morning radio show. I need to speak to your program director to discuss it.

Uh, he's not in yet. He'll be here at, um, 9 o'clock. Okay, well, I can start with your station manager, since he'll need to be in the conversation as well. Um, wow, um, he gets in at 9 too. I, um, I can, uh, can I have him call you? Very well. I'll expect to hear from him at 9. I'll need to speak to your station manager, your programming director, and very likely your on-air personnel from this morning. I'll also need your station logs. Oh, yes, sir. I'll make sure he calls you right away. All right, I'll be expecting his call. Here's my number. At this point, I gave the radio guy the second number that I looked up in the phone book. The main number for the San Francisco office of the FCC. The radio guy, stammered his thanks and promised a call back and we hung up. I went back to the radio. I heard the disc jockey say, uh-oh, the FCC is calling. Well, they can't do anything to me. I've got a year of pre-law in college and blah, blah, blah. He continued his defiance for a few minutes and then went to commercial. I kept listening. They stopped talking about the prank call. They stopped

taking phone calls from listeners. They stopped talking to the husband. They started playing music. lot of music. I listened for the rest of the day. They didn't talk about it the rest of the day, and they didn't replay it at noon. In fact, for the rest of the week I listened, I heard nothing about it. I was a bit surprised. I figured they might stop talking about it for a little while, but not altogether. It wasn't until later that I realized why they went so silent. I'd scared them. In my quest to get a little vengeance for that crying woman I'd never met, I scared them. But more to the point, I'd embarrassed them, and jerk disc jockey had helped. Once he went live with his bravado against the call from the feds,

their listeners knew they'd been called and heard the silence afterwards too. They were embarrassed because I had just done to them what they had done to her, and they didn't want to have to admit it. You know, back in my day, when I was a very, very stupid teenage boy, probably about 13 and 14, I tried prank calls. I made two attempts, and they both went disastrously. I will briefly tell you about both of them. One time I was at my grandma's house,

and me and my brother decided to do a prank call. So we called some random number and did some, I don't even remember what we said, we made some stupid joke. And immediately, this person called back and my grandma picked up the phone, and then my grandma scolded us. Keep in mind, this was back when not everyone had phones

with, like, caller ID on them, so we didn't know, for sure that they'd be able to return the number, but that was incredibly unsuccessful. The second time, I called up some random number, and I realized as soon as someone answered the phone that I didn't actually have a joke prepared, so I just said, uh, is Elizabeth there, or whatever name, just some random name off the top of my head. And the guy said, can I ask who's calling? And I was thinking, oh my God, is there actually an Elizabeth at this random number I called? So I said, uh, a friend from school? And he said,

One minute, I'll get her. At this point, I was shocked on multiple levels. One, there's actually an Elizabeth there. Two, this girl is actually school age. And three, she's old enough that presumably her dad would go let her talk on the phone. So at this point, I just totally panicked and hung up. So those two failed attempts were enough for me and I completely stopped prank calling. You know, I also stopped being 14 when you think those ideas are funny and cool. That was another major factor? Our next Reddit post is from Mercury for real. Back in the early 90s, my friend Lou was selling

his Mazda RX7 via an ad in the old print auto trader. It came out every Thursday, so that first weekend was critical for sales. The very first guy that came to see it on Saturday said he wanted to buy it after driving it. Of course, he had to finance,

so they couldn't finish the sale that weekend. Lou was worried about losing all the bites from the new ad, so he asked for a deposit of 500 bucks. The guy wrote a check. Lou told the rest of the callers that weekend that it was sold, and unfortunately didn't ask for their numbers in case it fell through. This story predates caller ID availability in my area by a couple of years, so those leads were gone. As you surely expect by now, the guy flakes on Monday and Lou deposits the check. Payment stopped. Big surprise.

Sitting around my apartment, we schemed revenge, but all we had to go on was the check. Lucky for karma, there was a phone number printed on it. Our idea was to write a little program to dial his number repeatedly from my modem, but that would be easily stopped and probably get us in direct trouble. Then, Lou got a page from his work. This was way back in the one-way pager days. You call the pager's dedicated phone number, it sounds a tone, then you punch digits for the number you want to be sent to the pager.

The person with the pager receives the number you entered and presumably calls it. Everyone with a pager made sure that people who needed to get a hold of them had the number for their pager. You'd see pager numbers in print and TV ads all the time for various services. Boom, angelic choir sayings, heavenly lights go off. Loo's pager number and my pager number had the same prefix, the same middle three digits. What if we randomly dial numbers with that prefix and page them all to this guy's number? So we ordered a pizza, open some beers, and start looking through yellow pages at locksmiths and tow truck services to find more pager prefixes. We wind up with a dozen or so.

After that, it was half an hour of coding. I put together a program that would cycle through our list of known prefixes and add a random final four digits to get a random pager. It called the pager's number, paused, and then dialed this butthole's number and then throwed a 911 suffix on there for good measure, which is something people with pagers understood to indicate an emergency of some kind. We start eating the pizza and let it fly. I was very picky about my devices, so my modem was very fast. It could run through four pages per minute, so this guy would be getting 240 calls per hour. We just watched it run and laughed our butts off.

We realized pretty early on that we didn't really know if it was working, so we wandered down to the 7-Eleven and called. this guy from a pay phone, just in case he could somehow trace it or the po-po were on the case and watching. A man answered and I said, Hello, I got a page at this number. I heard an audible sigh and then he just hung up. Gold! We ended up running it for a few hours, then let it go quiet for a few days. Then we scheduled it to start dialing in the middle of the night every few days. Plus, we'd fire it up by hand randomly whenever we had a party. We checked again from the 7-Eleven

after a week and it went to an answering machine, which did the rapid tone at the end of the greeting to indicate the tape was full. We reasoned that the line was still ringing anyway, so we kept at it for another month or so. Eventually, we got the disconnected warning when we made one of our regular checkups. I'm sure he just changed the number. I like to think about that guy answering the phone after a few days of silence when we started it up. I can vividly imagine his response at the, Did someone page me to this number? As he slams the phone down and then it rings again a few seconds later. Or, of course, coming home from work and having an answering machine full of random people asking about being

paged. And yeah, we annoyed several thousand people into calling this guy by the end of it. But each of those people was only put out for a single call. A cost, yes, but a necessary one for justice. Down in the comments, we have this story from Tricky. radish. My first corporate job was level one support for a Fortune 500 company. It was a big room with all of us in it. Boss man had a cubicle in the corner. Nobody else had a cubicle. Anyway, he would always dial his phone on speaker, then pick up when someone answered. I ended up finding a phone

number that had a local area code, which was a phone sex line. Now, this one didn't waste any time. Once the call connected, the recording got right down to business. So I paged him. So I paged with it. Then waited. I heard him call the number and the whole room heard, I want to suck your, before he picked up the phone so fast, it sent the phone sailing into the wall. That was our slash pro revenge. And if you like this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day.