Audio Play / Touch Tone Terrorists

Pay yo' bill or we shut you off!

Touch Tone Terrorists is a series of prank call CDs that were recorded by Pete Dzoghi, a man from California who bought a series of 1-800 numbers that were only one digit off the numbers of customer services of actual businesses such as UPS, a bank, a loan provider, a phone company, an auto insurance company, a pen service, a department store and many more. When people called his numbers, he would disguise his voice using an electronic synthesizer such as a Gentner SPH-3A and a Yamaha SPX90 transposer to adopt many fake personas, assume the identity of customer service representatives and start answering the calls. When customers would issue verbal complaints, he would then start insulting them and make wild conversations

The prank call victims were then contacted again and be informed that they were being used for part of a gig and that they would be compensated generously and their identities kept secret if they agreed to have their voices as part of the prank call CD albums. The majority of victims agreed to give permission to have their voices used. These albums can be purchased on Amazon or iTunes, while hard copies are going out of print and are hard to obtain nowadays.

Pete Dzoghi claimed that the process of printing these prank calls into content put on the market was very excruciating. Calls would come in while he was fast asleep, and so he'd have to set up his synthetic equipment on time to answer it. He also had many legal troubles with the businesses whose phone numbers resembled those he purchased, and he often had to consult with his attorneys that what he was doing was legal. Ultimately, laws changed in his home state of California that no longer made it legal for him to make calls incoming to his house, and so he retired from prank calling altogether.

Two of his prank calls were featured on Crank Yankers, with Willie and Jim Bob getting their own puppets.

Characters include:

• Junkyard Willie, the most commonly heard character. He is an African-American man with a very deep voice who is very unsympathetic to the complaints of the customers and will often start bad-mouthing them rather than listen to any of their complaints.
• JimBob, a retarded hillbilly who whenever is put in charge of handling a call just throws the conversation with the customer in the wrong direction, which further frustrates the customer.
• Stu Jaimison, the highest-ranking man who is usually referred to when the customers ask to speak to a manager. He often insults customers who are asking about resolving financial issues,
• Vladimir, a rude Russian representative who has no idea what the customers are saying and just insults them.

Tropes include:

• Blame Game: The phone service reps often like to shift blame back on the customers for whatever complaints they issue.
• Greed: The reps refuse to issue any refunds or send any checks to customers requesting them, and would proceed to insult the customers as just entitled whiners who are just looking for handouts.
• It's All About Me: The reps in every way conceivable. Not only are they selfish and refuse to help the customers out in anyway, they also like to pull the conversations with the customers in their own direction completely throwing off the purpose of why the customers called them in the first place.
• Jerkass: Just about all the phone service reps.
• Straw Misogynist: Junkyard Willie has a very low opinion of women.
• The Operators Must Be Crazy: Pete himself when playing a character would pretend that the customer dialed the right number and start trash-talking them with either insults, blame shifting, utter nonsense, outright refusal to do anything to resolve the customers' issues
• The Unintelligible: JimBob would often start yapping in gibberish.
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: Many customers often ask the reps how did they even get hired in the first place when all they do is badmouth the customers and violate both federal and state laws about honesty and compliance to paying customers.