tracfone

I can't really think of a creative name right now, so I'm gonna stick with tracfone.

Example Output

{
  "minutes": 895,
  "texts": 660,
  "data": 155.09,
  "service_end_date": "2017-01-04",
  "phone_number": "1234567890"
}

Purpose

To scrape phone balance data from my carrier.

I kinda just hacked this together today and felt like publishing it. If you feed the program a valid TracFone phone number, it'll spit out the minutes, texts, and megabytes remaining. TracFone offers a pay-as-you-go service, so it's useful to have this data for rationing purposes.

Maybe later I'll shove this data into a machine learning algorithm to predict when I use the most minutes / text / data.

Secondary Purposes

Maybe TracFone should bump up their security? It's kind of scary considering that I can check anyone's phone number with this program, and within 20 seconds find out if their carrier TracFone. And if so, how many minutes they have remaining on their personal plan. Personally, I don't mind the security risk and enjoy being able to scrape this data. As a plus, now I can graph my family's phone usage. 😏 If I poll every few minutes, I can see exactly when people are watching videos, etc.

Also, this program has the fun side effect of being able to scan for legit phone numbers. It takes a while (about 2-3 seconds each), but is definitely doable.

Requirements

1. Get nodejs and npm
2. npm install -g casperjs phantomjs-prebuilt

Usage

1. Open up app.js with your favorite editor
2. Change var PHONE_NUMBER = "1234567890"
3. casperjs app.js

Logging

Additionally, it'll log data to balance.csv so that you can periodically record entries. Use cron or a bash while loop for this, e.g. while true; do casperjs app.js; sleep 60; done.

Graphing

todo, but on the way