As many others I also got in trouble for racking a phone bill. The fix was using the white pages that had a section that showed your prefix and all the other prefixes that were in the same zone, which was considered a free local call.
Yeah that hit home to me as well. When I was 13, I remember downloading some kind of exe file that dialed out to some international number to some BBS in South America. It was just one time but that call ended being a several hundred dollar phone bill. I got my computer taken a way for several months after that. It was good lesson in computer security to not trust random files from the Internet.
