Radio Shack social justice vigilantes.
I once worked for a few years at a Radio Shack store in the mid to late 80s: business had become quiet ever since the new supermall had opened a couple of miles away with its own RS and we found ourselves with a lot of idle time during the afternoon periods.

One of my friends who also worked there was a fantastic electronic tinker: when bored, he would routinely open up the various boxes of electronic gadgetry and tweak them for improved performance. Many a customer must have received a pleasant surprise when they found their two way radio sets now had an operational range of five miles instead of the advertised and FCC-limited one thousand yards; or when they opened up their new Pro-34 programmable multiband radio scanner and discovered it was several orders more sensitive as well as capable of accessing all the supposedly locked out cellphone and private police frequencies. We would keep one of the modified Pro-34s as a display unit and during slow periods set it to scan for interesting conversations over the supposedly private airwaves.

One afternoon we were listening to cellphone dialups and my friend was idly writing down the phone numbers being called: prior to the modern network system the touch tones were still in use and it was child's play for him to identify telephone numbers from their tone frequencies. We usually just tossed the numbers in the garbage as the calls themselves were relatively harmless: dope dealers discussing their latest hauls or a couple of punks discussing which of their friends they were going to rip off that afternoon. One evening, however, we came across a call which drove us to action.

The radio locked onto the phone call as the carrier went high, so the phone number was easy to capture: it was a fairly innocuous sounding discussion between an overworked businessman and his wife, who asked him to come home to dinner and spend some time with the kids and his repeated refusal to show up soon, citing a huge backlog of extra paperwork to get through before closing on some important deal. With a resigned sigh, she relented and told him she would try to keep things warm upon his return, whereupon she hung up.

The radio did not resume scanning: this could only mean the guy on the other end had kept carrier high in order to dial another number. Quickly perking up, my friend hit the lock button to keep the scanner from drifting after this particular session and hurriedly jotted down the number being dialed and leaned in towards the scanner's loudspeaker. When the answer came, it was the sound of a young lady asking who was calling. The businessman identified himself to her whereupon she expressed great pleasure with his call, followed quickly by his saying, "I'll be right over, honey." The carrier dropped at that point. We stared at the now softly hissing scanner, then almost simultaneously looked at each other and said, "Bastard!"

It took us a few minutes to decide on a plan of action: as I seem to have a talent for turning a wrong number call into a full conversation I dialed the number of the housewife and, quickly explaining that this was not a wrong number I adamantly tried to convince her to call up the other phone number in a half hour's time and keep calling until someone answered, then ask for her husband to come to the phone. I quickly explained our "accidental" eavesdropping and said such a wonderful sounding lady did not deserve to be treated in this manner. I never knew what happened afterwards but she thanked me and hung up. This happened about sixteen years ago before the vaunted "caller ID" systems were widely implemented so we did not fear any sort of reprisals along those lines: in today's world it seems accidental SMS and email address errors reveal far more indiscretions any airwave vigilantes could hope to equal.
( Felis Concolor, Fri 11 Jun 2004, 2:07, Reply)