Anonymous Public Phone Call

The older sister trope to Burner Phones. This is when a character, usually in an area with only a few services and no internet, uses a public phone, like a pay phone or phone booth, but the other character who is being called is unsure on who's calling, as the caller has made a disguised or anonymous call. Public phones have the caller labeled as anonymous at worst, and labeled as the pay phone at best. Because of how the caller is kept private or anonymous, the caller can disguise themselves or come off as someone else, or disguise the activity taking place. A caller may do this if they are phoning in an anonymous tip about the Big Bad's crimes or a Corrupt Politician's embezzlement.

This complicates Phone-Trace Race, making it harder for others to track them down. Though, it is the only way to trace people who have gone missing on a road trip. Alternatively, this trope could be used to play a Prank Call on others.

In Real Life, pay phone and phone booth calls keep the caller anonymous, but the pay phone can be tracked down by the police and other intelligence services. Authorities are not stupid and the few remaining pay phones in modern countries are likely to be under camera surveillance - combine this with the plethora of CCTV cameras in modern society they can very likely track you to and from your starting location and the pay phone making it very unlikely you'll actually be entirely anonymous if you do this.

This trope is largely a Discredited Trope now, due to cellular technology making pay phones obsolete, and ones that still work are fairly difficult to find (the UK still has a few thousand telephone boxes dotted around the isle, however).

Compare Secret Identity Change Trick, when a plot device, such as Phone Booths and Pay Phones, is used as a method of hiding a disguise for transformation. May overlap with Prank Call or Harassing Phone Call. If you are looking for the use of any object as a disguise, the correct page is Mobile Shrubbery.

It does not matter if the receiver knows the person, but doesn't know that the caller is the person. After all, Tropes Are Flexible.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Case Closed: Before he gets his cellphone, Conan uses a phone booth to make voice-disguised Shinichi calls to Ran (to the occasional passer-by's startlement).

Films - Live-Action

• Some hitmen from Angels with Dirty Faces weaponize this to try to kill the protagonist. They have one of their goons call into the restaurant the protagonist is in, anonymously ask the owner said protagonist, and wait for him to enter the tight little phone box to gun him down. He'd have no room to dodge the gunfire and with no way to track the call, he'd have no way to see it coming if another of their guys hadn't screwed up.
• Dark City: After John wakes up, Dr. Schreber calls his hotel room from a phone booth, trying to explain very quickly what's happened to him and why he has to run right now.
• Dirty Harry. While holding a girl for ransom, Scorpio forces Inspector Callahan to run around the city from one phone booth to another to check he's not being followed before delivering the money. At one point someone else hears the phone booth ringing and picks it up, nearly blowing the whole thing.
• The Fugitive: Pay phones are a crucial part of Kimble's search for his wife's killer, as he needs to keep moving to evade the US Marshals. He's shown placing calls to various suspects, claiming to be tracking them for a high school reunion; the one time he uses a house phone is to lure the Marshals there, as the house belongs to Sikes, the one-armed killer.
• Juggernaut: When the bomber rings up to demand a ransom, the police do a Phone-Trace Race only to find it's just a relay, attached earpiece-to-mouthpiece to another public phone which is receiving another call from the bomber's actual location.
• In The Living End, Jon repeatedly tries to call Darcy from different phone booths on his road trip with the increasingly violent and unstable Luke. These intermittent phone calls get her very worried, but due to bad connections and the untraceability of the pay phones, she can't figure out where he is or how to help him.
• The Man Who Knew Too Little has an inversion, where a British spy agency sends verbal instructions to their assassins and other agents by calling up a public phone booth at a predetermined time. What sets off the plot is when one of these calls goes wrong: The assassin is a few minutes late, and another guy picks up the phone and mistakes the instructions for part of the experimental LARP session he'd signed up for.
• Subverted at the end of The Matrix. Neo places a call to the Agents from a phone booth. Not only is the Agents' call trace interrupted, implicitly by Neo's One powers, but he very publicly flies out of the phone booth.
• In Mulholland Dr., Betty tries to find out if there was an accident on Mulholland Drive without exposing her identity to the police. So she places a call from a payphone outside a diner. When the police officer confirms the accident and asks for her name she quickly hangs up.
• Spoofed in Paddington (2014): When Mr. Curry undergoes a Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal, he calls the Browns from a phonebooth with a badly altered voice to tell them where Paddington has been taken by the Big Bad. Mr. Brown nonchalantly greets him by name, despite the former's protests he is "Murry", and eventually tells the rest of the family that it's "Mr. Curry, doing a silly voice".
• Phone Booth sets the entire movie around this, with the protagonist being stuck in a phone booth under threat of a sniper on the other end of the line as the police attempt to figure out the situation.
• A Technology Marches On version occurs in the sci-fi thriller Runaway. Mad Scientist Dr. Luthor rings up the detective to taunt him, and says it's no good trying to trace the call because he's calling from a mobile phone.
• In Séance on a Wet Afternoon, Phony Psychic Myra Savage instructs her Henpecked Husband Billy to kidnap the daughter of wealthy industrialist Charles Clayton. She then sends Clayton a ransom demand, signed "Longfellow", with instructions to signal his willingness to co-operate by placing an ad in the Evening Standard. When he posts the ad, she tells Billy to call Clayton from a pay phone as "Longfellow" with instructions for the ransom handover. The police engage in a Phone-Trace Race during the call, with Clayton stalling for time by pretending to misunderstand the instructions, but eventually Billy, who isn't entirely on board with his wife's scheme anyway, loses patience and hangs up.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020): Once Sonic and Tom become the fugitives of the law, Tom tries to explain the situation to his fellow deputy Wade and learn what's going on, using the pay phone to make sure nobody tracks them down. It fails, because the government agents were standing right next to Wade. Robotnik ends up taking the phone and then proceeds to threaten Tom (who punched him in the face earlier) that he would track him down and make him suffer, right before Tom hangs up.
• In The Specialist, Ray makes all his calls from pay phones to reduce traceability. It still provides the police a clue to his location, as he makes calls that are close to escape routes in the event of a traced call, and the police eventually notice that all the booths he uses are at bus stops, and he therefore lives somewhere accessible to that bus route.
• Stand by Me: The four boys end up making one of these to the police after discovering Ray Brower's body near the end of the movie, instead of making it public as they had originally planned.
• Three Days of the Condor. The protagonist does the wiring public phones together trick to avoid a trace, only he borrows a phone linesman's kit and wires fifty phones together.
• Trading Places: Having secured the advance copy of the orange crop estimates, Clarence Beeks calls the Duke Brothers from a pay phone outside the Department of Agriculture in Washington D.C., disclosing where and when he'll give it to them, with Billy Ray Valentine listening in on the conversation, as well.

Literature

• In The Brotherhood of the Rose, by David Morrell, a spy who's under surveillance uses a phone booth to make contact, but in a subversion the call is meaningless and the actual message is a code written as graffiti on the booth.
• The Executioner series:
  • Mack Bolan would often disguise himself as a telephone repair linesman while doing a reconnaissance and phone-tapping of his target, and sometimes he'd use this equipment to call them directly. He will also make regular contact with undercover FBI agent Leo Turrin by sending him a collect call from a Mr. La Mancha. Turrin would refuse to accept the call, then leave his office and contact Bolan via a public phone booth.
  • In Into the Maze, Able Team are in Mexico City and have to make contact with Stony Man without going through the US embassy, which they think has been compromised. They also have to transmit a lengthy recorded transcription of an interrogation. So they make use of the services of the Oficina de Telefonos Larga Distancia which provides private booths where you can make long distance phone calls. Unfortunately the NSA has been compromised as well and tells the people hunting them where they are.
• In Jumper, Davy makes a few calls to his girlfriend Millie from payphones in an attempt to make it difficult for the government to track him, even at one point paying a homeless woman so that she can call Millie in his place.
• In the 1928 Lord Peter Wimsey mystery The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, a mysterious phone call is made to the victim's apartment by a man using a fake name, and the police trace it to a public phone in a train station. A sign of how new the trope was at the time is that Lord Peter's first response to this news is to ask if the operator can identify the caller, with the police officer he's talking to having to clarify that it's one of the new type of automatic pay phone with no operator.
• A Point Horror staple:
  • Martha is harassed by these calls in "Trick or Treat" by Richie Tankersley Cusick, all threatening her with impending death.
  • In Richie Tankersley Cusick's "The Mall", Trish is followed by a Stalker with a Crush who calls her on the mall payphones to tell her that he's watching her.

Live-Action TV

• Agent Carter. In "Time and Tide", Peggy Carter tracks down Howard Stark's stolen inventions, but Jarvis convinces her that taking credit for this would have disastrous consequences for her. Instead Jarvis calls in an anonymous tip, disguising his voice by speaking in a fake American Brooklyn accent that he seemed to have learned from watching gangster movies.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?: "The Tale of the Phone Police": A boy calls a number supposedly belonging to a man arrested by the Phone Police years ago for making prank calls, but quickly hangs up when he actually gets an answer. Said prisoner somehow calls the pay phone he and his friend are walking past the next day.
• Better Call Saul:
  • Jimmy makes a call to the Kettlemans in 'Mijo' to warn them of Nacho's designs on their (stolen) money. Unfortunately, it leads to the Kettlemans high-tailing it to the New Mexico hills with their kids.
  • Part of Mike's gambit to have Tuco arrested is to call the police on a payphone, anonymously report about an "old man" being attacked by some gangster, then approach and provoke Tuco into attacking him. He times it just right so that the police respond to the call just as Tuco takes the first swing.
  • After Mike learns that a Good Samaritan was killed by Hector due to his actions, he scours the desert to find the body. Once he does, he calls the police on a payphone to report it, claiming that he found it while he was illegally looking for arrowheads on tribal land, hence his refusal to give his name.
• Breaking Bad: In "Felina," Walt makes his way back to New Mexico as a fugitive; part of his plan involves calling the Schwartzes' secretary from a payphone, claiming he's a journalist scheduling an interview, so he can find out when they'll be home.
• Cracker:
  • In "The Mad Woman In The Attic" Part 2, a man claiming to be a priest calls the police from a railway station payphone claiming to be able to confirm a man suffering from amnesia after seemingly jumping off a train is the Serial Killer "Sweeny", as he told him he murdered a woman and dumped her body in a river in confession. The police are able to track the phone call to the platform but by then the caller has departed on the train. Searching the river they do find another body. As Fitz quickly figures the caller is in fact Sweeny, who is trying to remove the one witness to his crime.
  • Subverted in "To Say I Love You". Whilst on the run from the police Sean attempts to do this by using a payphone to contact the police about arresting his girlfriend and partner, however, his speech impediment means he's unable to even start the sentence, and failing to do so makes him so angry he just storms off.
  • Floyd Malcolm the Serial Rapist of "Men Should Weep" uses this to contact Fitz. First calling him on his radio show to try to get him to confirm his decision that he should just kill his next victim to avoid the police identifying him (and so he can pass the blame onto him), and then later at his home to confirm he took "his advice."
  • Janice, Fitz’s Stalker with a Crush from "True Romance", uses one of the university’s phone boxes to contact his radio show after it’s announced he's been taken off the investigation into the men she's been murdering to get his attention. The police manage to track the call, but despite Fitz's efforts to keep her on the line, they just miss her. Later, after Janice kidnaps Fitz's son Mark, they pre-emptively try to avert this by having officers watching all the public phones in the area, only for her to instead use her landline, knowing they would track it, so she can meet Fitz face to face.
• Endeavour: Used in "Striker", the Oxford Mail receive a phone call claiming to be from the Provisional IRA threatening that if Jack Swift, the Northern Irish star player of the Oxford Wanders plays in upcoming Cup Rematch game they will shoot him dead. The police trace the phone call, but it turns out it was made from the public payphones at the Royal hotel. It turns out the affair is in fact an elaborate False Flag Operation by a Loyalist militia who want him dead for raising money for Irish youth groups.
• Happy Valley:
  • Towards the end of the first episode, after getting cold feet about the kidnapping plot, Kevin Weatherhill tries to contact Ashley Cowgill to talk him out of it, but Ashley refuses to take any calls from him, knowing that if anything goes wrong the police will go through their phone records and could find the connection. Kevin eventually finds a phone box to talk to him, unfortunately by this point his fears and timidness have whittled him to the point that all he can accomplish is trying to ensure that Ashley's men won't hurt Ann, which Ashley just brushes off, stating as long as things go to plan they won't.
  • In the same episode, after contacting Nevison on Ann’s mobile to tell him they've taken his daughter, Ashley directs him to a public phone box by the service station to properly relate the terms of the ransom.
• In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "Mrs Crabtree's Neighbourhood", after the police learn the Victim of the Week's secretary accidentally revealed his whereabouts in a phone call, they trace the call to a public phone box. Higgins is assigned to question everyone in the shops around the phone box as to whether they saw anything, but without much hope of success. It turns out they did see something important, although its significance is only revealed by comparing it to other assassinations by the same hitman.
• Person of Interest. The Machine contacts its creator Harold Finch (and later other members of Team Machine) by dialing a pay phone near their position and giving them a coded message when they pick up. The location of the Machine (not to mention its existence) is so classified that not even Finch knows where it is, and even knowing of the Machine's existence is enough to put your life in jeopardy, hence the need for an anonymous point-of-contact. However thanks to technological advancement the number of public phone booths in New York City isn't as high as it used to be, and so Decima Technologies buys up them up in order to shut them down, keeping the few remaining under surveillance in the hope of intercepting Team Machine when they try to make contact.
• Silent Witness: "Snipers Nest" Adrian Turner calls a payphone at the site of his latest killing, simply for no other reason than to boast how they had no hope of catching him. The police attempt to track the call, but it turns out that it was made from another payphone.
• Supernatural: Subverted in Season 4 when Dean finds an old payphone and calls Bobby after being mysteriously resurrected from the dead. Bobby assumes it is a scam artist and hangs up on Dean, so Dean has to hotwire an old car to drive to Bobby's. Even in 2008, the sequence felt quaint for its use of vintage tech.
• A Touch of Frost: Graham McArdy, the smart but utterly sociopathic kidnapper from "Paying the Price", uses a series of different payphones around town each time he contacts Sue Venables following kidnapping her sister Pauline, always ensuring to never use the same one twice. This makes tracking him effectively impossible for the Denton police, as even with instance tracing, Graham's always well away by the time they arrive. For added anonymity, Graham also goes to the trouble of muffling his voice each time to ensure it can't be linked to him.
• Thunderbirds: In Trapped in the Sky, The Hood uses a public call box to inform the airport control tower that a bomb has been planted in the landing gear of the Fireflash aircraft. He wears a mask to disguise his face while he makes this call.
• In True Detective Season 1, a robber who claims to have information about The Yellow King gets a call from a remote payphone and then kills himself before he can reveal anything. The caller even wiped his fingerprints off the phone.
• The Wire: pay phones are still in heavy use during the first seasons. Proposition Joe also uses a phone and series of different voices to call into the Police department to find what unit Herc is assigned to.
• Wire in the Blood: Props up a few times, especially when dealing with killers who like to taunt the police:
  • "Still She Cries": the Serial Rapist calls to the police to taunt them after abducting each victim which keeps being traced back to payphones in which he leaves a naked barbie doll. As the episode attempts to track keep getting harder with the rapist somehow managing to keep moving around undetected and the police always arriving just to late no matter how close they are. Until they eventually get their mid call and discover the box is empty. It eventually transpires that the rapist is a phone company engineer who's really been simply tapping into the phone lines to make the calls.
  • The Bradfield Sniper from "Synchronicity" calls the police twice during his killing spree, first to mock them about never being able to stop him, next to demand an enormous ransom (which he doesn't even intend to collect; it's just a distraction whilst he kills someone else), with both calls being traced back to payphones on different sides of town.

Music

• The second verse of "What's My Age Again?" by blink-182 describes a disguised prank call from a pay phone:
  Later on, on the drive home
  I called her mom from a pay phone
  I said I was the cops and your husband's in jail
  This state looks down on sodomy
• Inverted in Limp Bizkit's video for "Take a Look Around", where the band members are called to a pay phone from an anonymous source that gives them a mission to complete.

Video Games

• The Adventures of Willy Beamish: Willy tries to enter the Golden Bowl Tavern again on day 4, but Ray doesn't let him in. He calls Golden Bowl on a public phone and asks to speak to Ray, then plays a message from an astrological hotline recorded on tape. Since Ray's superstitious, he falls for it completely, letting Willy enter without him in the way.
• In Detectives United: Phantoms of the Past, James is wanted by the local authorities as a "dangerous criminal," which is just the excuse they're using to lock him up because they can't control him. After seeing the sheriff put up Wanted Posters with his face on them, he dons a disguise and uses the pay phone to call in a phony tip about his own whereabouts, sending the sheriff on a wild goose chase to keep him busy.
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: Set in 1986, Tommy Vercetti is regularly shown doing this, paying homage to Scarface (1983), which has similar scenes of Tony Montana doing this.
• Grand Theft Auto V: Lester uses a series of payphones to contact Franklin to do hits. In Grand Theft Auto Online oncce you buy the Agency, Franklin will give the protagonist hits via the same method.

Western Animation

• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In "Prank Call of Cthulu," Billy becomes obsessed with making prank calls, but he's always foiled by caller ID. He makes a smart decision—calling from a payphone—and a dumb decision—dressing like a cowboy—to beat the ID. Somehow, Mandy's caller ID still recognizes him. This is the last straw that drives him to seek out a mystic phone from Grim's trunk that has no caller ID, but also happens to belong to Cthulu.
• The Simpsons: Homer attempts to prank call Dean Peterson using this trope in "Homer Goes To College". It's a subversion however, as the Dean not only recognises Homer's voice, he can see him at the payphone from his window.
• Spider-Man: The New Animated Series: In one episode Peter uses a payphone to give the police an anonymous tip about the next target of a bunch of criminals. Quite humorously the dispatcher then asks him to provide his name and location, with him spelling out what "anonymous" means.

Real Life

• The D.C. Sniper Attacks relied on this trope. The attackers called to taunt the police without revealing themselves, and the call was traced to a public phone at a gas station.
• For a modern take overlapping with Burner Phones, some places, especially those where individual cell phone service has not yet been widely adopted, have street vendors who will rent out a cell phone for single calls (and usually paid in good old untraceable cash). Even people who have personal cell phones will sometimes use a street phone for some purposes.

---