covert@covert.enet.dec.com (John R. Covert 27-Aug-1990 1044) (08/27/90)
AT&T Security is deadly serious about catching and prosecuting serious violators of its tariffs (which, in the case of fraud, tend to be backed up by federal and state law). In particular, w.r.t. collect calls, old tariffs (1974) that I have state: "Abuse or fraudulent use of service includes the placing or acceptance of a call by a subscriber, his agent, employee or representative, in response to an uncompleted long distance call, which was not completed in order to transmit or receive intelligence without the payment of the applicable message toll charge." This means that both parties can be charged in cases where a collect or person-to-person call is made for fraudulent purposes. If someone calls you person-to-person collect, and leaves a callback, you (in theory) must call back via the operator number given in the callback message, which guarantees that the call ends up billed at the full rate, not the dial rate. In 1969 I visited the offices of Telephone Company Security to settle a small matter of accused (but not committed) fraud. I had been calling NPA 555-1212 and whistling it off, then listening to the failure recording, in order to determine what the first routing point was for each principal city in the U.S. Since this is the first step in the blue-box procedure, security demanded that I explain what was going on, which I did. While there, I was shown a box of operator tickets. Security had been sorting through all uncompleted calls looking for patterns, like trucking companies getting person-to-person calls and telling the caller that the called person had gone to city x. Truckers were calling for themselves, and the city was a coded message. With the automated system, fraud will be even easier to prove -- there is a recorded record of the fraudulent message in the callers own voice! Don't try it. john