"Circa Late 80s. You could make a long-distance collect call from a payphone, and charge it to a private number. The operator would call the other number to confirm.
We’d ask the operator to call the number of another payphone nearby and have a friend authorize the call. Free long distance for almost a year."
Solo_is_dead
Most of the time, the operator knew the number was a pay phone. After ~5 tries, we would get an operator who didn’t know or check that it was a pay phone.