This node is a recollection of my days when I was a freshman-sophmore in high school. That would make it about 1996-1997.
There was a time when
AOL was far less regulated than it is today. It was possible to do a lot more things back then, some things that were most definitely criminal. I use the term AOL Delinquent because I'm not sure what else to call this group of people.
During this time, scamming AOL was incredibly easy. Their credit card verification system was very lax back then. It was possible to create lots of fake accounts using
phixes.
phixes- The first 4-6 numbers of a
credit card. By randomly mashing in numbers afterwards, it was possible to create fake credit card numbers that AOL would accept. Accounts created with these
phixes would sometimes last until the next billing cycle.
However, although it was possible to connect to AOL via these fake accounts, the accounts were usually used for a far more sinister purpose.
Phishing.
phishes- Someone else's account that you are using without their knowledge or consent. Due to the temporary nature of the fake account, it was popular to use a fake to go to a
New Member Lounge where you would pretend to be an AOL security official. There would usually be some kind of story involved as to database malfunction, and how the person needed to verify their password by IMing a response with their password in it.
Getting
phishes (phishing) was an extremely tedious task, so a couple of coders invented ways to automate it. There came a fleet of
AOSomething programs that could do this. I call them
AOSomething programs because that's what their names all were. The original
AOSomething was
AOHell. There were tons of others, from
AOLucifer to
AODogg and whatever other words you can think of.
AOSomthing programs- Not only did these automate the task of phishing, they also included other delinquent sort of features. One was
IM Bombing also known as
punting. You IM someone so rapidly that their computers would usually freeze. There was also
e-mail bombing which just filled up a person's mailbox with crap and forced them to sit and wait for the whole mailbox to load up. There were also assorted features, like things that would scroll ASCII pictures in the chat rooms and the always fun
TOSing.
TOSing was the euphemism for cancelling someone else's account.
However, the previous information is mostly just grunt stuff. The truly 1337 among the AOL delinquents had their eyes on a totally different prize...the
Overhead Account.
Overhead Account- These things are a bit difficult to fully describe, even I didn't what they were exactly. From what I discerned, they were upper-level AOL accounts given to companies that were thinking of making AOL their internet service provider. My friend and I would get these accounts by calling AOL and pretending to be some obscure software company. He (I couldn't do it, I sounded far too young at the time) would tell them that they were looking into getting their company connected via AOL. After giving them some fake information, my friend would recieve one of those AOL verification certificates, only this one would lead to the creation of the eagerly sought after
Overhead Account.
What was so great about these accounts? First of all, they were free, so theoretically they could be eternal. But the next two features excited AOL Delinquents the most. They could IM people who had turned off their IMs (that meant bascially you could IM Bomb anyone for as long as you wanted and they couldn't do anything about it) and they were better tools for
TOSing other people's accounts.
AOL Delinquents frequently hung out in Private Room: warez, warez2, warez3, ..., warezN. I found out that AOL had recently started raiding those rooms a while ago, and then the activity moved to Private Room ColdIce.
Anyway, if you haven't noticed, all of these techniques are completely outdated so really this information isn't going to help you become a 1337 AOL d00d. I believe there are no longer such things as
Overhead Accounts,
phixes no longer work because they call your house to verify your number, and most of the
AOSomething features have been rendered useless by new AOL policies.
Thanks to
novalis for pointing out that nowadays there still are Overhead accounts. Also for point out that there phixes don't work because AOL verifies the credit card info like everyone else does.