Home » Tech Diary — Mid 1990s (retold 2023)

Tech Diary — Mid 1990s (retold 2023)

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Gain by rubbery laws

This was preceded by a short conversation about problems with the current SIM cards, Christian doesn’t have enough data volume, I have unlimited data, but it doesn’t work very well in the country.

Kathrin: I can remember a time when you had ten to twenty SIM cards, was that some complicated trick?

Christian: Not ten to twenty. 450. I had a company at the time. We bought a thousand pieces, and there was another one from Cologne who bought the other 650. We paid twelve marks for the SIM card, including the mobile phone. These were the first prepaid cards that were lured to the cell phone. But Telekom didn’t manage to get cell phones that could do this locking. The software didn’t exist for that back then. So you could sell the phones without the card. So that’s what we did. We’ve already earned more money there than the 12 marks we spent. They were cheap cell phones, but we sold them for 15, 20, 30 marks. And since the mobile phones were not lured to the map, we now had the maps left. At that time there was no regulatory authority. You could unlock all 1000 cards on a fictional name. We did. Each card had a balance of 50 marks. We then sold them individually for 25 marks. Half profit – for whoever buys it. Because he can make 50 marks on this number. The number is already registered, to a fictitious type. Since he can call 50 marks, after that it falls off. But! Dropout control works on phone, but not on SMS. That comes a month later. That means, after the 50 DM are empty, you can still write as many text messages as you like until they notice: Oops! Now there is no more money.

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Catherine: When was that?

Christian: Hm, sometime in the mid-90s. I paid for my car with that. And the guy in Cologne who did it with me, they got his ass and not me. Because I said, okay, that’s enough for me that I’ll resell the tickets for 25 marks. And he went and had an 0190 number set up for his company and used all these cellphones to call his own cards, which he had bought for twelve marks, to his own 0190 number and then got 80 percent paid out by Telekom from the 50 marks. And then they got him. Then they sued him and that was the end of the story. Did he pay more than he got in? I obeyed the law. They were still quite rubbery at the time, and that was very handy.

(Christian Cohrs, interviewed by Kathrin Passig)

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