According to the video they got their samples by calling people up and saying numbers to them until they repeated the numbers back to get them to stop. So the zero guy was probably pretty upset
Yeah. That was an intentional choice on his part. That guy is pretty famous in the underground phone hacking world. 2600 Magazine was a big deal. People who read it understood the reference.
It is believed that Agents for whom the call is intended for (in this example Group 415 may well be the Agent's number) will recognise the music and then the difference in how the numbers are pronounced, this way they know if it is genuine or not - however it can easily be copied now. Back in the old days of the cold war etc they used actual voiced numbers, and this was changed later as potentially people could be recognised for their voice saying the numbers. There is some crazy examples out there from old numbers stations that no longer exist for both Russian and English sides, and of course Chinese/Taiwanese number stations - China routinely uses jammers on the Taiwanese ones to make it extremely difficult for agents to hear messages.
Radio has the mysteries that people thought the deep web contained back in the day lol. You are never too sure what’s a government rabbithole and what’s just some people having fun.
I'd think that calling a numbers station phone number would immediately put you under surveillance by counter intelligence. This immediately narrows down the population who is the target of the message. A broadcast radio numbers station is impossible to figure out who is receiving the message.
Exactly why it was publicly published and it would have been only called by the intended recipient, from any particular number, once. If you're interested, there are plenty of resources under a search for tradecraft.
It used to not be as easy. Wireless and cellular telephones has made intercepting telephone calls very easy. On a wired line, you'd have to tap that specific number. And that could only happen at the actual phone company switch, at the telephone pole where the line branches off to that phone from junction box, or some mechanical tap at the phone. There used to be a microphone transmitter that could be placed in the handset of a rotary telephone under the voice mike. That's why pay phones were so popular, because you'd never be able to tap ALL the pay phones.
I agree. Putting real clandestine intelligence instructions on a wired line would add huge risks of traceability that are not present with listening to global radio. If the message was a genuine breach of a nation’s security the resources turned toward the problem would be substantial. Also, if an agent uses a one-time pad a second time, it’s no longer a one-time pad. There would be no need for a looped music placeholder because it’s an out-message, not a frequency. But they did a great job of capturing the spooky feel and making a mysterious puzzle.
Bro..2 thoughts. 1. This ep/vid is in a class of it own. It deserves a medal. Thanks for it. 2. YOU deserve a medal for being courteous and classy to all the commenters who think they "get"it but are not in the same COUNTRY, much less ballpark as the truth. Bravo
Not entirely surprising. During the early days of UA-cam (maybe even today too for all I know), the Russian FSB left coded messages for their overseas agents as youtube comments on a specific YT channel that had to do with a (I think it was Spanish?) Footballer. It was apparently a very popular channel at the time and you wouldn't notice the messages unless you were the person looking for the specific comment at the specific time and date it was to be made. Russia seems to not particularly care if bystanders can see the message, since it's not like it can be easily broken anyways, if at all.
I’ve never heard of this thats fxcking wild. The craziest thing I’ve seen in the comments was somebody who claimed they were being held captive against their will. If it was a prank, it was a very good one as their comment was highly specific and their typing read like they were in a rush to post something. all the other comments they made with their account were calls for help as well. it creeped me tf out bcuz kidnapping happens a lot more than the media leads on
@matthiasthulman4058 in reality 99.8% of missing children make it home. Most kidnappings are parental figures who take a child without the other parents consent.
There was a number some years ago for a hotel in Holland connected to the G20, if you called it you where given a code, after the G20 the number vanished and the hotel is actually a coffee shop
It sounds like the Bilderberg group, I once called back in (about 2012) just to see if it was true that you get a frosty German receptionist and yes it was true. I asked her If I could make an appointment to interview people there as I was a freelance Journalist writing a piece, she immediately put the phone down. I called back and got a discontinued tone.
I dunno if you ever did it in Machester but when I was a kid in the midlands we used to dial an 0800 number that was 666 666, and it was weird. The message was something like 'There is no service at telephone number Six (dramatic pause) Six (Dramatic pause) Six. and then the line would cut off. It wasn't the usual operator voice, it was a man similar to the speaking clock man but it almost sounded sarcastic or contemptuous. I've always wondered if that was some kind agent spookery.
AM radio was the only way to listen to our local sports back in the 90's. One friday night I found myself parked in the middle of nowhere and for some reason all the FM stations weren't coming in very well so I decided to switch to AM and listen to our highschool football game. Only station that came in wasn't a regular station and it was playing the tones that you hear taking a hearing test over and over in different order. It was really kinda spooky. When it finally stopped the regular stations on both AM and FM started coming in loud and clear. I decided to leave that rabbit hole alone unless I ever heard someone mention it. It's till a mystery all these years later and I hadn't thought about it in a very long time until the algorithm put this video in my feed. It had to something localized to the area I was at because I never heard a word about nobody being able to listen to the game or complain about all the radio stations being off the air or having very poor reception. If any of you radio sleuths have an idea what it was let me know in the comments.
May have been scheduled transmitter maintenance (where TX power is lowered for safety or technical reasons) - if tones were repeated at non-mechanical intervals then could have been engineers doing end-to-end tests, checking studio-transmitter links, equipment malfunctioning or some remote switching attempts. Perhaps EBS/EAS tests? Were you hearing pure sine tones or EAS SAME / FSK style sounds?
I love all things number stations. I've even written a couple of tracks about number stations a few years ago. I remember listening to Lincolnshire Poacher back in the early 80s quite often. I hadn't heard about this stuff. Very cool. Thanks for sharing!
Great video as always! I’d forgotten all about this. I remember how much buzz it created back in the day. Thanks for the very enjoyable walk down memory lane!! 😊
Because the majority of them were psychopaths in the adult industry on cocaine...these were test lines for IVR - which was mostly chat lines, adult talk lines and group chats. I used these all the time to test my code in the 80s...or maybe early 90s i forget exactly.
In an alt.reality kind of way. If you look at the Craigslist ad listings, you will occasionally see posts in free sections that lists some innocuous item, but in the description text there will be several thousand words of unrelated text that seem like blocks of either random words or random passages or pieces of other ad descriptions. These get posting in many different CL servers. Seems like it might be a "book cipher". Or maybe just a badly written CL ad bot.
Radio is preferred because it can be transmitted from and listened for anywhere by anyone. This created loggable events tied to individual people when ads were purchased, when VOIP services were hired, when people called them, etc etc etc... It does not meet the requirements of a secret message.
Agree. If I were, say, MI6 and posed the question to my research team, “If our adversaries used this Craigslist, telephone, OTP method and tried to cover their tracks, could we find out who they are? How long would it take? What would we need to do? What, if any, tools or techniques are needed?” Then simply try it. This might be part of an experiment. Governments like to simulate what their adversaries might do, then figure out how to counter it. Not sure what advantages this would give compared to numbers stations. Seems like poor OPSEC. I suppose it could be a dire emergency plan if, say, a numbers station got taken out.
I wonder if the pitch or tone of the spoken numbers is also part of the cypher? It sounds like they either took random audio clips of people saying numbers, or they had a bunch of people read off numbers and then put them together. It's weird because it would be much easier to just use a computer voice, so they went to some effort to use audio clips
I bet the NSA/CIA already have this information. The problem is having human analysts being able to identify or spot anything to break through the noise.
The people who work at the NSA probably enjoy topics like radio, spycraft, encryption, etc, and there are certainly some already subscribed to this channel by their own volition.
Before UTF-8 encoding was adopted by the majority of websites (a point reached sometime in the late '00s), trying to write characters that weren't in the basic Latin set was something of a crapshoot, often resulting in the "mojibake" phenomenon of wrong characters appearing. To this day I still sometimes come across old pages with garbled quotation marking, because there was a mismatch of encodings (the original composition encoding, the display encoding set by the HTML 4.x header, or even some storage encodings in between) causing mangling of the angled quotation marks or apostrophes. So to avoid such errors, people sometimes limited themselves to basic Latin characters. In this case, as you say, it's also possible to use "ae" as a substitute, but the writers, due to not actually being literate in German, probably weren't aware of such an orthographical alternative.
I mean it has to be assumed that at some point in the past intelligence services has used craigslist to communicate with agents in the field. Of course they'd likely advertise a used ford Taurus at 30% over fair market value or something like that. At any rate the group proved there point.
I remember this; kept my rapt attention for awhile. People were analyzing the waveform of the song (little black heart by Aha). The effort and speculation really impressed me. Trying to weed out the fakes and etc became sport. Good times man.
Wow. I remember I was training with the Saigon boxing team for a while. It's on a gov facility. I sat down for a coffee at a shop on the property. I heard these numbers playing over the TV, mixed in with a few gibberish english words. It was going non stop for the 30 min I was there. Now I think the TV was picking up a shortwave radio as mentioned in this video.
I called that number back when this first happened. Honestly I'm sure that's what they wanted. If only one person calls the number then this can be tracked. Whoever the one person that calls is the person the message was meant for and goverments can track that down. But if 100000 or more people call then you have no idea who the right person is. This was the event that tipped me off on number stations and I've loved the subject ever since.
Yeah it's a weird concept for a "numbers station". These people must have only been in it for the luls. Only way to hide in the masses is if each phone number becomes popular, and even then you can narrow it down by comparing who calls the different numbers, after a while the list grows short. Also, it's easy to check if persons of interest interact with the numbers.
@@Trebor74 But if your agent goes through a number of burner phones that's suspicious behavior that can be caught. Much easier and safer to just have a radio that can receive shortwave.
I'm looking at Craigslist right now! I check the electronics section everyday for any interesting radio gear. I've bought several things from that source in the past. 8-)
05:59 converted from Ascii to text gives chines characters which translates to "The workers in the factory were furious and angry." repeating over and over again.
😕 Honestly I have an unpleasant sensation that I might well have contributed to this sort of activity. When I worked on telephone systems we regularly used a fully plain text terminals to access the IP phone systems. 😬 Well, if hackers watching the stream then they would have had been able to watch fully unencrypted server passwords going back and forth. With those passwords they would then have been able to access the servers on these phones systems and configured them how they wished. That security hole was plugged even while I worked there but I have a sense of anxiety about how many years and servers preceded that solution.
The “03105” reference is associated with the Cicada 3301 puzzle, a complex internet mystery that began in 2012. This puzzle involved various cryptographic, historical, and mathematical challenges designed to recruit intelligent individuals. The number "03105" is a part of the puzzle's clues or solutions, often used to reference specific coordinates or information related to the puzzle.
I remember when this came out. Disappointed that it wasn't actual spooks getting caught doing shenanigans. But. To this day If you look at the Craigslist ad listings, you will occasionally see posts in free sections that lists some innocuous item, but in the description text there will be several thousand words of unrelated text that seem like blocks of either random words or random passages or pieces of other ad descriptions. These get posting in many different CL region servers. Seems like it might be a source for a "book cipher". Or maybe just a badly written CL ad bot.
Dont know if anyone has said this or if it will be said by the end of video. When the numbers are being stated in the recordings, there is one number in a seemingly random location in each set of numbers is in a distinctly different, and much clearer voice than the rest. This could explain all of the extra zeros, they are all decoys, only the numbers in this distinct voice are useful. I only say this because this different voice which seemed clearer and easier to understand stood out in a huge way to me when hearing this. And it would make sense for purposes of simple decryption with a number/letter key. Just putting it out there, im sure that i camt possibly be the first to suggest this, but then again, everybody else could have thought the same thing and not said anything....
Could be for that purpose, could also be part of some demarcation in addition to the audible pause between number groups so that you can distinguish what side of a number group you were on if perhaps you had to listen to this message in conditions where background noise in your location made it difficult to concentrate/hear/recall what has been read-out. I don’t know if this is something that is common to all number stations. Could very well be what you said though. It could also server as a delimiter of sorts that through some other mechanism of summing numbers that you shift N-places left or right of that distinct number to find the actual number of real value. Good thought all the same.
I love figuring out codes and ciphers. I’ve gotten quite good at it. It’s like playing chess, but only having the board and pieces in your mind, which I’ve been doing since I was a kid. Even leaving games and coming back to them hours, even days later. Playing blackjack with multiple decks and counting cards all in your head is another good one.
"Thank you for calling the NSA SpyLine. All our agents are currently spying on other people, please remain on the line while our computers analyze the routing of your call as you count from zero to nine."
It might be as simple as Putin handing a soccer ball to someone trained to read a specific thread layout from a certain angle. This person would know the exact time and date to use an unsecured cell phone to dial particular numbers. Within a few blocks of their location, strategically placed devices (Stingers) would intercept the codes transmitted at the specified times they decode, dictated by the thread and patch configuration of the ball, as well as a subtle tilt adjusted using a tiny magnetic point identified with a 50mm x 50mm magnetic field viewing film. Only the individual trained to use the ball for scheduling telecom signal times would know the exact position to point that magnetic spot and how it should be oriented, enabling them to decode the true sequence of the messages embedded in the ball's thread start and end points. Messages would be detected by nearby Stingers, touch tone five digits, with the first two representing alpha letters from AA to ZZ (for example, rc719). In this case, "rc" points to an index of grouped words and the 719th row in that group, and so on. On the phone keypad, it would be 72719, which could indicate looking at a New York obituary notice. Then, another code might represent the third week, fourth day, and a specific month, etc.
@@N8Dulcimer lithium batteries "exploding" has been a thing for over a decade. The pagers had implanted explosives though, an untampered (read: no explosives inside) lithium battery cannot create the type of explosion seen in the pager/radio attack. I do see the irony just would rather there not be a bunch of fear mongering over batteries
Hiya mate. Your vids are always so informative. Don't number stations broadcast creep you out? I've been enthralled with radio since a kid. Worked a bit in it too. The poacher especially Nov 26 1977. The famous interupt. I was 7..remember being frightened out of my life watching the news that day. ...
A phone can be traced, so you can bets there is gonna be a couple relays between the source and the phone line to stop a trace beyond to where the modem is sitting.
This would be an awesome thing to base a new version of Person of Interest on, with the Machine coming back online for a new generation and using this method to communicate to the new assets about who was in danger/at risk of endangering. I’d watch that!
yoo.. i remember my weird phone number encounter now, I remember punching in quite a random sequence of numbers on the landline phone when i was a kid, all of the numbers just returned one of those failed to dial beeping sounds, but one asked me for a code of some kind, it was so weird
Yosemite Sam station did something similar to this in the 90’s but instead of giving out a number to be called it would randomly call private homes and business’ during regular business hours and then play a prerecorded message…
I heard this at the time in 2006. Was on "Off the hook" radio show. Wesley Crusher from Star Trek (Will Weaton) solved the puzzle done by some hackers. Commenting at the start of the video so you might have covered all this.
Smart of them to get hundreds if not thousands of people calling these numbers. If they thought someone was getting too close, suddenly lots of people have plausible deniability and the intended caller is obfuscated if someone got ahold of call logs.
Another interesting Episode Lewis. I wonder if a Numbers station could use online sites like FB and using VPNs to cover their tracks? I don't know much about using VPNs but I presume the Authorities do so they could easily find out where the message originated. So I suppose that could answer why SW radio is still the preferred method of sending messages .
Correct me if I'm wong, but the noun fraulein isn't commonly used in the modern German language? Not that this proves anything in this context but may have been a hint that the ad didn't originate from Germany? A discussion point for a message board of old maybe ?😊
Well, we still use the word "Fräulein", but not very often. It is still used, for example, in warning your girl-kids that it is getting severe, if she is not changing her behaviour right now, or sth. like that. ^^
I noticed something similar on youtube comments under soap opera channels comment section. There were dates in french in full letters and they respond each other, sometimes dozens of times. Some of them were repteatitive and I guess it was to end the message or the exchange. Probably meaning zero (Because repeating it 5 times).
It’s a one time pad being used to encode info. Without knowing what text ‘group 415’ refers to, there’s zero chance it will ever be decoded by anyone other than those that have the ‘group 415’ text. Mathematically, there is zero chance of cracking the code.
Didn't some of the old numbers stations end up being industrial automation systems? Like reading out lake water levels or some other remote sensing station?
It could be anyones recorded voice message that someone recorded off the air. A number's station doesn't keep repeating the same numbers forever, and they broadcast over the air. People don't call a numbers station for messages. A numbers station doesn't use a cellular service and have no phone number. They don't need to. They have a secure satellite data link to an operator at a service if there is an emergency. These are people playing a game.
All this stuff reminds me of the old 1800 FIREGOD number people were calling years ago that people suspected was some kind of number station situation.
Secret Numbers Station Phone Numbers Were Posted On Craigslist - The Recordings
ua-cam.com/video/P_kXsPDoYjs/v-deo.html
Provider is MCI Worldcom
The numbers mason!, what do they mean!?
The real game was getting the numbers of all the spooks that called it
Haha. You've all been trolled!
Brings a whole new meaning to classified ads.
damn that was clever. nice
Hello there lol
👍🏻😁
No pun intended?
Comment of the year
If someone hasn't said it already, "Zero" guy could use some anger management.
I'm having trouble understanding the "one" guy! Is it really "1" he's saying?
yeah the creepiest part was the way the zero was said, it felt to harsh compared to everything else
😂
@@MercuryKurogane Well, it is German, a harsh language. I'm betting all of the numbers were sampled rather than computer generated.
According to the video they got their samples by calling people up and saying numbers to them until they repeated the numbers back to get them to stop.
So the zero guy was probably pretty upset
Emmanuel Goldstein would be a pseudonym. It's the character of the rebel leader in Orwell's 1984.
A fake rebel leader at that. Very strange implications.
@@Davidrcobb Controlled opposition... still in use today ;)
Yeah. That was an intentional choice on his part. That guy is pretty famous in the underground phone hacking world. 2600 Magazine was a big deal. People who read it understood the reference.
@@michael_r He also served as a consultant when they were making the movie "Hackers."
Holy balls, you realized that now? Not like all of this has been around for 30yrs or so, naah...
I will hear that voice saying "Zero" in my nightmares tonight.😳
Me too.
TOGETHER then. We'll dream it TOGETHER.
The Zerodiac.
I am using it as my ringtone.
It is believed that Agents for whom the call is intended for (in this example Group 415 may well be the Agent's number) will recognise the music and then the difference in how the numbers are pronounced, this way they know if it is genuine or not - however it can easily be copied now.
Back in the old days of the cold war etc they used actual voiced numbers, and this was changed later as potentially people could be recognised for their voice saying the numbers.
There is some crazy examples out there from old numbers stations that no longer exist for both Russian and English sides, and of course Chinese/Taiwanese number stations - China routinely uses jammers on the Taiwanese ones to make it extremely difficult for agents to hear messages.
The most surprising thing for me about all of this is that Aha has another song!
The Illinois Enema Bandit is an anagram for Hunter Is A Coke Head In High Places.
@@donwayne1357 obviously
They should have used Living Daylights.
In places like Brazil, a-ha had dozens of successful songs. Only in US they are seen as one hit wonders.
@@therealnotanerd_account2 next you are going to tell me Big Country had other songs than In a Big Country!
Radio has the mysteries that people thought the deep web contained back in the day lol. You are never too sure what’s a government rabbithole and what’s just some people having fun.
Should be Homeland Insecurity. 😮
@@raymondmartin6737 Cornholed by the Great Cornholio.
Don't bend the wiener on the web.
If it's low enough frequency to be heard from across the ocean, it's definitely government. We can't blast those kinda waves all willy nilly.
"Governments" are fictions... Dig a little deeper.
I'd think that calling a numbers station phone number would immediately put you under surveillance by counter intelligence. This immediately narrows down the population who is the target of the message. A broadcast radio numbers station is impossible to figure out who is receiving the message.
Exactly why it was publicly published and it would have been only called by the intended recipient, from any particular number, once.
If you're interested, there are plenty of resources under a search for tradecraft.
The point was to make it go viral so you'd never have to call.
It used to not be as easy. Wireless and cellular telephones has made intercepting telephone calls very easy. On a wired line, you'd have to tap that specific number. And that could only happen at the actual phone company switch, at the telephone pole where the line branches off to that phone from junction box, or some mechanical tap at the phone. There used to be a microphone transmitter that could be placed in the handset of a rotary telephone under the voice mike.
That's why pay phones were so popular, because you'd never be able to tap ALL the pay phones.
I agree. Putting real clandestine intelligence instructions on a wired line would add huge risks of traceability that are not present with listening to global radio. If the message was a genuine breach of a nation’s security the resources turned toward the problem would be substantial. Also, if an agent uses a one-time pad a second time, it’s no longer a one-time pad. There would be no need for a looped music placeholder because it’s an out-message, not a frequency. But they did a great job of capturing the spooky feel and making a mysterious puzzle.
you really think people using the number stations would use common cell and landlines lol cmon yall
"Every time the message repeats itself, it gets shorter so eventually, it'll be gone"
"Its a countdown...they're using our satellites against us..."
Eagle 20, Fox 2!
@@jong3122 Hellooo boyyyyyys!!!
IMMMMMM BBBBBAAAAAAAAAACCCCCCCKKKKKKMKKKKMK
‘You knew then, and you did nothing!’
All cable repair men know this
“The chair is against the wall…the chair is against the wall. John has a big mustache…John has a big mustache”
avenge me!!
Long mustache, not big.
@@Hillbilly-mgjwv thanks Mr Helper. I’m sure there were lots of people confused by my misquote of a fictional movie
I had a feeling this was a Defcon challenge lmao. Those crypto guys are a crazy batch.
Seriously
..that's all it is?
Like "creepy videos" are always ARGs. Mkay.
During the Crowdstrike incident, many tech support lines must have sounded like this for a while…
Especially if you were trying to get " an Amazon refund "
Bro..2 thoughts. 1. This ep/vid is in a class of it own. It deserves a medal. Thanks for it. 2. YOU deserve a medal for being courteous and classy to all the commenters who think they "get"it but are not in the same COUNTRY, much less ballpark as the truth. Bravo
Not entirely surprising. During the early days of UA-cam (maybe even today too for all I know), the Russian FSB left coded messages for their overseas agents as youtube comments on a specific YT channel that had to do with a (I think it was Spanish?) Footballer. It was apparently a very popular channel at the time and you wouldn't notice the messages unless you were the person looking for the specific comment at the specific time and date it was to be made. Russia seems to not particularly care if bystanders can see the message, since it's not like it can be easily broken anyways, if at all.
If done corectly one time pad cant be broken at all.
I’ve never heard of this thats fxcking wild. The craziest thing I’ve seen in the comments was somebody who claimed they were being held captive against their will. If it was a prank, it was a very good one as their comment was highly specific and their typing read like they were in a rush to post something. all the other comments they made with their account were calls for help as well. it creeped me tf out bcuz kidnapping happens a lot more than the media leads on
@poindextertunes the kidnapping statistics, specifically kids, that's a real rabbithole to make you lose hope.
@matthiasthulman4058 in reality 99.8% of missing children make it home. Most kidnappings are parental figures who take a child without the other parents consent.
They were found to be using Reddit to pass coded messages too. A few years ago.
There was a number some years ago for a hotel in Holland connected to the G20, if you called it you where given a code, after the G20 the number vanished and the hotel is actually a coffee shop
I think I could go for some international intrigue coffee right about now.
It sounds like the Bilderberg group, I once called back in (about 2012) just to see if it was true that you get a frosty German receptionist and yes it was true. I asked her If I could make an appointment to interview people there as I was a freelance Journalist writing a piece, she immediately put the phone down. I called back and got a discontinued tone.
@@markburgess8603 I got her to meet me for coffee. Quite a woman.
that was probably a front for a drug operation or my best guess is a trafficking ring
Dutch coffee shops are different. 😵💫
with classic number stations the opening melody is usually used to identify the sender or origin of the msg
A-ha! I knew it.
I dunno if you ever did it in Machester but when I was a kid in the midlands we used to dial an 0800 number that was 666 666, and it was weird.
The message was something like 'There is no service at telephone number Six (dramatic pause) Six (Dramatic pause) Six. and then the line would cut off. It wasn't the usual operator voice, it was a man similar to the speaking clock man but it almost sounded sarcastic or contemptuous. I've always wondered if that was some kind agent spookery.
Sounds like a drop station
AM radio was the only way to listen to our local sports back in the 90's. One friday night I found myself parked in the middle of nowhere and for some reason all the FM stations weren't coming in very well so I decided to switch to AM and listen to our highschool football game. Only station that came in wasn't a regular station and it was playing the tones that you hear taking a hearing test over and over in different order. It was really kinda spooky. When it finally stopped the regular stations on both AM and FM started coming in loud and clear. I decided to leave that rabbit hole alone unless I ever heard someone mention it. It's till a mystery all these years later and I hadn't thought about it in a very long time until the algorithm put this video in my feed. It had to something localized to the area I was at because I never heard a word about nobody being able to listen to the game or complain about all the radio stations being off the air or having very poor reception. If any of you radio sleuths have an idea what it was let me know in the comments.
May have been scheduled transmitter maintenance (where TX power is lowered for safety or technical reasons) - if tones were repeated at non-mechanical intervals then could have been engineers doing end-to-end tests, checking studio-transmitter links, equipment malfunctioning or some remote switching attempts. Perhaps EBS/EAS tests? Were you hearing pure sine tones or EAS SAME / FSK style sounds?
Definitely the Emergency Alert System if it was "tones in different order" and affected all stations you could receive.
UFO passing over. You should have looked up and you would have seen a black triangle. No radio waves can propagate within their EM field.
@@ChristopherWoods Nah bro it was fourth dimensional entities.....
I love all things number stations. I've even written a couple of tracks about number stations a few years ago. I remember listening to Lincolnshire Poacher back in the early 80s quite often. I hadn't heard about this stuff. Very cool. Thanks for sharing!
Great video as always!
I’d forgotten all about this. I remember how much buzz it created back in the day.
Thanks for the very enjoyable walk down memory lane!! 😊
Why are numbers stations so creepy. Get goosebumps every time I hear the prerecorded messages
That's one angry sounding numbers station for sure..
ZERO!
You would be too. Probably not as angry as the people who found out what a One Time Pad is....
Because the majority of them were psychopaths in the adult industry on cocaine...these were test lines for IVR - which was mostly chat lines, adult talk lines and group chats. I used these all the time to test my code in the 80s...or maybe early 90s i forget exactly.
That group of five zeroes sounds like a barking dog. 😊
@@stoneneilsdo what now? in what way is the adult industry connected to the intelligence community?
This got me to go look at the Craigslist forums. All I can say is...interesting.
In an alt.reality kind of way.
If you look at the Craigslist ad listings, you will occasionally see posts in free sections that lists some innocuous item, but in the description text there will be several thousand words of unrelated text that seem like blocks of either random words or random passages or pieces of other ad descriptions. These get posting in many different CL servers.
Seems like it might be a "book cipher". Or maybe just a badly written CL ad bot.
@@obsidianjane4413I’m going with ai bot
It is a shadow of it's former self. You could buy PEOPLE on CL
@@obsidianjane4413 bots.
Radio is preferred because it can be transmitted from and listened for anywhere by anyone. This created loggable events tied to individual people when ads were purchased, when VOIP services were hired, when people called them, etc etc etc... It does not meet the requirements of a secret message.
Agree. If I were, say, MI6 and posed the question to my research team, “If our adversaries used this Craigslist, telephone, OTP method and tried to cover their tracks, could we find out who they are? How long would it take? What would we need to do? What, if any, tools or techniques are needed?” Then simply try it.
This might be part of an experiment. Governments like to simulate what their adversaries might do, then figure out how to counter it.
Not sure what advantages this would give compared to numbers stations. Seems like poor OPSEC. I suppose it could be a dire emergency plan if, say, a numbers station got taken out.
I wonder if the pitch or tone of the spoken numbers is also part of the cypher? It sounds like they either took random audio clips of people saying numbers, or they had a bunch of people read off numbers and then put them together. It's weird because it would be much easier to just use a computer voice, so they went to some effort to use audio clips
I wonder who at the NSA/CIA has to watch this tomorrow...
I bet the NSA/CIA already have this information. The problem is having human analysts being able to identify or spot anything to break through the noise.
Well, that would depend on whether or not the Mossad instructs them to do so, as they are entirely subservient to them.
@@johnsmith7676you are insane.
They already saw it the second it went up online....especially nsa.
The people who work at the NSA probably enjoy topics like radio, spycraft, encryption, etc, and there are certainly some already subscribed to this channel by their own volition.
Incidently "Fräulein" is written with ä, or ae if your Keyboard does not support Umlaute.
Before UTF-8 encoding was adopted by the majority of websites (a point reached sometime in the late '00s), trying to write characters that weren't in the basic Latin set was something of a crapshoot, often resulting in the "mojibake" phenomenon of wrong characters appearing. To this day I still sometimes come across old pages with garbled quotation marking, because there was a mismatch of encodings (the original composition encoding, the display encoding set by the HTML 4.x header, or even some storage encodings in between) causing mangling of the angled quotation marks or apostrophes. So to avoid such errors, people sometimes limited themselves to basic Latin characters. In this case, as you say, it's also possible to use "ae" as a substitute, but the writers, due to not actually being literate in German, probably weren't aware of such an orthographical alternative.
I mean it has to be assumed that at some point in the past intelligence services has used craigslist to communicate with agents in the field. Of course they'd likely advertise a used ford Taurus at 30% over fair market value or something like that. At any rate the group proved there point.
I remember this; kept my rapt attention for awhile. People were analyzing the waveform of the song (little black heart by Aha). The effort and speculation really impressed me. Trying to weed out the fakes and etc became sport. Good times man.
Incredibly interesting! I love this topic! Also, I think you have the coolest voice for narrating videos.
Thanks! 😎
I figured it out the code says "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine!" What a minute?!😮
I really miss those days. God knows what would happen to you today, the three letter sense of humor has shifted. Great story man.
Thanks for listening
Wow. I remember I was training with the Saigon boxing team for a while. It's on a gov facility. I sat down for a coffee at a shop on the property. I heard these numbers playing over the TV, mixed in with a few gibberish english words. It was going non stop for the 30 min I was there. Now I think the TV was picking up a shortwave radio as mentioned in this video.
I called that number back when this first happened. Honestly I'm sure that's what they wanted. If only one person calls the number then this can be tracked. Whoever the one person that calls is the person the message was meant for and goverments can track that down. But if 100000 or more people call then you have no idea who the right person is. This was the event that tipped me off on number stations and I've loved the subject ever since.
This makes no sense
Yeah it's a weird concept for a "numbers station". These people must have only been in it for the luls. Only way to hide in the masses is if each phone number becomes popular, and even then you can narrow it down by comparing who calls the different numbers, after a while the list grows short. Also, it's easy to check if persons of interest interact with the numbers.
@@PlanetaryDefensenot if you use burn phones,etc. different numbers every time
@@Trebor74 But if your agent goes through a number of burner phones that's suspicious behavior that can be caught. Much easier and safer to just have a radio that can receive shortwave.
@@PlanetaryDefense not really,if you pay cash,etc there's no trace.
In the U S, the area code 212 is in New York City.
Area cose 678 is in Atlanta, GA...
613 is Eastern Ontario i.e Ottawa region
You can spoof phone numbers including area codes.
The call recipient could be anywhere.
Exactly they were test lines.
The world would be a stranger, probably safer, yet weird place without Craigslist. God bless 😂
Haha I agree!
stranger? have you read any lost connections or want ads?
Yeah, my former classmate from HS ended up as a case on "The First 48" after trying to buy a car from a Craigslist ad.
I'm looking at Craigslist right now! I check the electronics section everyday for any interesting radio gear. I've bought several things from that source in the past. 8-)
What a great story, love it, always like your content. Keep it up.
Glad you enjoy it! Thanks
This was actually a message stating protect Harambe at all costs. Sadly a decade later the mission failed and now the world is in ruins
Skynet Always Wins
a joke about a dead meme from almost a decade ago. hysterical 😐
Never forget 😢
That was a welcome throwback haha
@@poindextertunesThe fact that it's a decade old added to it being funny
That is one helluva twist on the radio number stations!
How did they expect anyone to be able to decrypt one-time-pad encrypted messages (except maybe for the one where they re-used the same pad once)?
That was cool as hell, thank you for making a video about this!
05:59 converted from Ascii to text gives chines characters which translates to "The workers in the factory were furious and angry." repeating over and over again.
At least the first few lines do. Once I had converted the whole list it turns to garbage according to google translate
😕 Honestly I have an unpleasant sensation that I might well have contributed to this sort of activity. When I worked on telephone systems we regularly used a fully plain text terminals to access the IP phone systems. 😬 Well, if hackers watching the stream then they would have had been able to watch fully unencrypted server passwords going back and forth. With those passwords they would then have been able to access the servers on these phones systems and configured them how they wished.
That security hole was plugged even while I worked there but I have a sense of anxiety about how many years and servers preceded that solution.
The “03105” reference is associated with the Cicada 3301 puzzle, a complex internet mystery that began in 2012. This puzzle involved various cryptographic, historical, and mathematical challenges designed to recruit intelligent individuals. The number "03105" is a part of the puzzle's clues or solutions, often used to reference specific coordinates or information related to the puzzle.
I remember when this came out. Disappointed that it wasn't actual spooks getting caught doing shenanigans.
But.
To this day If you look at the Craigslist ad listings, you will occasionally see posts in free sections that lists some innocuous item, but in the description text there will be several thousand words of unrelated text that seem like blocks of either random words or random passages or pieces of other ad descriptions. These get posting in many different CL region servers.
Seems like it might be a source for a "book cipher". Or maybe just a badly written CL ad bot.
Really interesting video Lewis. Amazing it was mentioned on radio.
Dont know if anyone has said this or if it will be said by the end of video. When the numbers are being stated in the recordings, there is one number in a seemingly random location in each set of numbers is in a distinctly different, and much clearer voice than the rest. This could explain all of the extra zeros, they are all decoys, only the numbers in this distinct voice are useful. I only say this because this different voice which seemed clearer and easier to understand stood out in a huge way to me when hearing this. And it would make sense for purposes of simple decryption with a number/letter key. Just putting it out there, im sure that i camt possibly be the first to suggest this, but then again, everybody else could have thought the same thing and not said anything....
Could be for that purpose, could also be part of some demarcation in addition to the audible pause between number groups so that you can distinguish what side of a number group you were on if perhaps you had to listen to this message in conditions where background noise in your location made it difficult to concentrate/hear/recall what has been read-out. I don’t know if this is something that is common to all number stations. Could very well be what you said though. It could also server as a delimiter of sorts that through some other mechanism of summing numbers that you shift N-places left or right of that distinct number to find the actual number of real value. Good thought all the same.
I love figuring out codes and ciphers. I’ve gotten quite good at it. It’s like playing chess, but only having the board and pieces in your mind, which I’ve been doing since I was a kid. Even leaving games and coming back to them hours, even days later. Playing blackjack with multiple decks and counting cards all in your head is another good one.
Great video mate. You never disappoint!
Thanks so much
These messagages would make great mix tapes.
This channel is a dream come true 🎉
The movie number station with John Cusack brought me here. Very interesting
That's an aggressive zero.
The area code is New York City, so I just called it. It answers with 2 beeps and abruptly disconnects.
"Thank you for calling the NSA SpyLine. All our agents are currently spying on other people, please remain on the line while our computers analyze the routing of your call as you count from zero to nine."
Yeah…we’re like that out here.
It might be as simple as Putin handing a soccer ball to someone trained to read a specific thread layout from a certain angle. This person would know the exact time and date to use an unsecured cell phone to dial particular numbers. Within a few blocks of their location, strategically placed devices (Stingers) would intercept the codes transmitted at the specified times they decode, dictated by the thread and patch configuration of the ball, as well as a subtle tilt adjusted using a tiny magnetic point identified with a 50mm x 50mm magnetic field viewing film. Only the individual trained to use the ball for scheduling telecom signal times would know the exact position to point that magnetic spot and how it should be oriented, enabling them to decode the true sequence of the messages embedded in the ball's thread start and end points.
Messages would be detected by nearby Stingers, touch tone five digits, with the first two representing alpha letters from AA to ZZ (for example, rc719). In this case, "rc" points to an index of grouped words and the 719th row in that group, and so on. On the phone keypad, it would be 72719, which could indicate looking at a New York obituary notice. Then, another code might represent the third week, fourth day, and a specific month, etc.
"It might be as simple as..."
Ahh yes buy a secret mission for probably $50
i guess the whole "your phone will self destruct" thing isnt so dramatic since lithium.
Don't forget to drink your Ovaltine!
@@luminousfractal420 sucks on teeth* given recent terrorist attacks on pagers and walkie talkies....
@@luminousfractal420 Lol are you a prophet?
@@N8Dulcimer lithium batteries "exploding" has been a thing for over a decade. The pagers had implanted explosives though, an untampered (read: no explosives inside) lithium battery cannot create the type of explosion seen in the pager/radio attack.
I do see the irony just would rather there not be a bunch of fear mongering over batteries
I'll bet there is a code in that music too.
Hiya mate. Your vids are always so informative.
Don't number stations broadcast creep you out?
I've been enthralled with radio since a kid. Worked a bit in it too.
The poacher especially
Nov 26 1977. The famous interupt. I was 7..remember being frightened out of my life watching the news that day.
...
A phone can be traced, so you can bets there is gonna be a couple relays between the source and the phone line to stop a trace beyond to where the modem is sitting.
This would be an awesome thing to base a new version of Person of Interest on, with the Machine coming back online for a new generation and using this method to communicate to the new assets about who was in danger/at risk of endangering. I’d watch that!
As a kid in the early 90s i used to dial random numbers and hope a girl would answer
That’s awesome!
US area code 212 is an area of New York City. Though the listing doesn’t seem to mention a country code.
Each of the phone numbers followed NANP format, the country code is 1.
Truly amazing video! Such a cool topic.
"You'd all be dead if it wasn't for my David!!!" --Judd Hirsch
What an awesome tale! Thanks!
Hey bro, that was a great video. Good job!
I think I'm gonna be hearing "ZERO!" in my dreams now.
yoo.. i remember my weird phone number encounter now, I remember punching in quite a random sequence of numbers on the landline phone when i was a kid, all of the numbers just returned one of those failed to dial beeping sounds, but one asked me for a code of some kind, it was so weird
Yosemite Sam station did something similar to this in the 90’s but instead of giving out a number to be called it would randomly call private homes and business’ during regular business hours and then play a prerecorded message…
I heard this at the time in 2006. Was on "Off the hook" radio show. Wesley Crusher from Star Trek (Will Weaton) solved the puzzle done by some hackers. Commenting at the start of the video so you might have covered all this.
They got the voices from craigslist "adult" ads by calling them and saying each number until they repeated it.
Given what we now know about the NSA, there's no way spies would use call-in number stations lol
It probably is the NSA, running a spoof to see who it is they catch looking.
Aaaand now, we're all on the list.
@@iknklst"we're all on the list"
Bitch I BEEN on the list
Right on. Thanks for sharing.
The way you said A-haaah... lol :)
I was tempted to partridge it.
@@RingwayManchester ah i wish you did now.. 😂
Absolutely brilliant. Excellent video, and love the use of you as a spy.
It looks similar to YT where in the comment section you will find just some names as comment.
Homeland Stupidity sounds like what it the US department should be called😅
Smart of them to get hundreds if not thousands of people calling these numbers. If they thought someone was getting too close, suddenly lots of people have plausible deniability and the intended caller is obfuscated if someone got ahold of call logs.
like TOR
Shazam says the song is: Little Black Heart (2019 Re-master) by a-ha
Yep… I said that
Another interesting Episode Lewis. I wonder if a Numbers station could use online sites like FB and using VPNs to cover their tracks? I don't know much about using VPNs but I presume the Authorities do so they could easily find out where the message originated.
So I suppose that could answer why SW radio is still the preferred method of sending messages .
After all these years, I still find this shit extremely creepy.
This should be outdated technology, yet it's still used daily, obviously.
This channel has a similar appeal to the BBC sitcom 'The Detectorists'
Awesome video thanks for posting 🙂👍
Thanks for watching! As always!
Correct me if I'm wong, but the noun fraulein isn't commonly used in the modern German language?
Not that this proves anything in this context but may have been a hint that the ad didn't originate from Germany?
A discussion point for a message board of old maybe ?😊
Without rewinding (so trust my memory here), it also wasn't capitalised.
Reference "red herring."
Well, we still use the word "Fräulein", but not very often.
It is still used, for example, in warning your girl-kids that it is getting severe, if she is not changing her behaviour right now, or sth. like that. ^^
@@Gundelfine thank you, I'm actually begining to learn the German language, this is helpful to me 😊
Now this was really interesting... for some reason this episode stood out to me.
I noticed something similar on youtube comments under soap opera channels comment section.
There were dates in french in full letters and they respond each other, sometimes dozens of times. Some of them were repteatitive and I guess it was to end the message or the exchange. Probably meaning zero (Because repeating it 5 times).
8:16 - The last one is still a shorter sign off number - It's 4 numbers instead of 5.
You’re right! Well spotted
It's basically like the French resistance radio in WW2,, but not sure if it's NATO or Russia!
Hemisphere map of these calls is out there somewhere in USSS custody to this day.
It’s a one time pad being used to encode info. Without knowing what text ‘group 415’ refers to, there’s zero chance it will ever be decoded by anyone other than those that have the ‘group 415’ text. Mathematically, there is zero chance of cracking the code.
@10:00 I guess I should’ve watched it through to see you already had it in the video. Great video
Didn't some of the old numbers stations end up being industrial automation systems? Like reading out lake water levels or some other remote sensing station?
No. Those send data bursts but not codes
Song is little black heart by AHA. Minor earth. Major sky.
I was wondering if the reference to Ensign Crusher was going to come back to Wil Wheaton. Awesome.
It could be anyones recorded voice message that someone recorded off the air. A number's station doesn't keep repeating the same numbers forever, and they broadcast over the air. People don't call a numbers station for messages. A numbers station doesn't use a cellular service and have no phone number. They don't need to. They have a secure satellite data link to an operator at a service if there is an emergency. These are people playing a game.
I told you it was a game… and whose voice it was…
The numbers station got a copyright strike for unauthorized sampling.
“Welcome to Verizon Wireless. Your call cannot be completed as dialed.”
Yea, I miss all the cool stuff.
Weird ! Love it !
'off the hook' wow memories from the past!!!
All this stuff reminds me of the old 1800 FIREGOD number people were calling years ago that people suspected was some kind of number station situation.
The main advantage of a numbers station is thats it is impossible to know who listened to it.
This throws that right out of the window.