Retrieving Dialed Phone Numbers from Intercepted Phone Calls

Over on his YouTube channel Linux Psycho has uploaded a video showing how he was able to listen in on wireless phone calls and recover the dialed phone numbers from within the conversation. 

The intercepted signal appears to be unencrypted in the clear NFM at 130 MHz and appears to originate from some sort of wireless telephone service. Heard in the phone call are DTMF dial tones. Later in the video Linux Psycho shows how to retrieve the dialed phone number by recording the DTMF tones and submitting the .wav file to an online DTMF tone detection website. DTMF tones are simply the tones that you hear when you dial a number on a landline phone. Each tone is a different frequency and so it is fairly trivial to recover the dialed numbers.

We’re not sure exactly what the signal that Linux Psycho is listening to actually is as it seems to be a cordless phone, but in the wrong frequency range. Potentially it is a long range wireless phone extension commonly used in the third world or rural areas where actual landline connections are rare.