Phone Loophole Lets Inmates Dial 0 for Overseas

One or more inmates housed in special quarters at the County Jail downtown have made more than $15,000 worth of telephone calls at the county’s expense, dialing locations around the world on telephones that officials believed were restricted to local calling.

The hundreds of unauthorized calls, which began in March and continued until the telephones were modified in early June, were made after inmates discovered a loophole in the county phone system: a dialing pattern beginning with zero that allowed them to bypass local-only restrictions.

“They were racking up $400 and $500 bills a day,” said Mary Rattray, the telecommunication network control manager for the county’s Department of Information Services. “They were really having fun. They were calling China, Switzerland, Puerto Rico, you name it.”

The abuse has led county officials to seek reimbursement from AT&T;, whose Alliance Network teleconferencing service was used to make the unauthorized calls. The county has also filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission seeking the right to reject the teleconferencing service, which officials claim makes the county vulnerable to widespread fraud.

“It’s just so irresponsible of AT&T; to permit something like this to occur, not to let us know that it can occur, and, once we bring the grievance to their attention, to let it ride,” said Bob Lerner, a spokesman for the county, which has paid the bill with money from the general fund. “You know we’re cash-starved. This does nothing to help our fiscal situation.”

Frank Laughton, AT&T;’s general manager for business network services in San Diego, said the company has not ignored the problem but has referred the case to its legal and security staffs for consideration.

“We have not let it go by,” he said. “The county is one of our best customers. We’re concerned when (fraud) happens because it hurts them, it hurts us, it hurts the industry. I wish we could respond faster. But we just can’t turn the wheels in 24 hours.”

Laughton said AT&T;’s teleconferencing system allows customers to set up conference calls connecting up to 50 locations. The problem for the county, he acknowledged, is that the caller can dial directly into the system without talking to an operator.

“It’s customer-controlled. You don’t even have to have operator involvement,” he said. “Their (the county’s) contention is we should have controlled it.”

According to Capt. Scott T. Boies, commander of the downtown jail, the unauthorized calls were made from four cells occupied by inmates who have chosen to represent themselves without a lawyer’s help. To prepare their own defenses, those inmates have two telephones in their cells--one for unlimited free local calling, the other for collect-only long-distance calls.

Beginning in March, when one or more of the inmates discovered they could dial long-distance, they took advantage of the loophole to make extensive calls, officials at the Department of Information Services say. The calls were first discovered in May, when a county billing employee noticed that the county’s March-April telephone bill showed a marked increase in toll charges from the jail, Rattray said.

The unauthorized calls were quickly traced to the four cells, she said. But, because of the special rights afforded to such inmates, it took a few weeks to decide how to alter the phones in a way that would not impede the inmates’ ability to prepare their defenses, she said.

On June 4, Rattray said, the county brought the calling spree to an end by blocking all “dial zero calls”--calls that are made by dialing a zero first--in that sector of the jail.

But that did not solve the broader problem. According to Rattray, the dialing method the inmates used will work on all 15,000 phones throughout the county system, not only in the jail--with potentially expensive results.

“This is a network-wide problem,” she said, explaining that even restricted county phones are programmed to allow numbers beginning with zero--a feature the county wants to preserve. Right now, that means that, on most county phones, “you could still dial anywhere in the world. And it would charge back to the county.”

To protect itself from such an expense, the county has asked AT&T; to remove the teleconferencing option from their system. But AT&T; has said no.

“We did not purchase or even ask for this teleconferencing service. We don’t want it,” Rattray said. “But their position, which the FCC has upheld, is that, ‘If you purchase access to our (AT&T;) network, you’re in.’ ”

Rattray is attempting to invent another way to protect the county from fraud. She has two options, she said: “We’d either totally have to block dial-zero calls, which we can’t do, or we’ll have to redesign our dialing plan. And that costs big money.”

The inmates whose pricey phone calls brought the problem to light, meanwhile, are as yet not being investigated. Boies, the jail commander, said he does not have an itemized bill that shows which calls were made by which inmates. Although it is possible to get such a list, he said, he isn’t going to bother.

“If the county thought it would benefit us to know who did what in terms of making phone calls, they could pin it down to each telephone,” he said. “But, since the inmates we’re dealing with are penniless, what is the point?”

Furthermore, he said, it is not clear that the making of unauthorized calls is a criminal act.

“If it were possible for me to prosecute criminally any of those people for abusing the phone system, I would in a heartbeat. But that’s not going to happen,” Boies said.

That news angers at least one prosecutor.

“Nobody’s going to do anything about $20,000 ripped off from the county?” asked Deputy Dist. Atty. Mike Carpenter, who is arguing a murder case against Billy Ray Waldon, one of the inmates who lives in the special quarters where the calls were made. “There’s a vacuum. Nobody’s investigating, and I certainly think somebody should.”

Waldon, who calls himself by the Indian name Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah, told The Times in an interview last month that he had been in touch with a Switzerland-based group called Incomindios, which he said stands for International Committee for the Indians in the Americas.

“Would you like to know their phone number?” Waldon asked, then rattled off a 10-digit number.

This week, an inmate who lives in a cell near Waldon’s was accused of tampering with the telephones in his cell and with making more than $10,000 in unauthorized calls.

Court records show that on Monday, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department went to court and accused Mark Allen Winston, who is scheduled to go to trial on burglary charges in August, of accruing “a telephone bill in excess of $10,000.”

But the Sheriff’s Department was not prosecuting Winston on criminal charges for the telephone abuse. Instead, department officials were seeking to strip him of his right to represent himself without a lawyer. Superior Court Judge Raymond Edwards Jr. denied the Sheriff’s Department’s motion.

“What happened here was the inmates found a loophole, and they exploited it,” Boies said. “People who don’t work with prisoners don’t realize the ingenuity of these people to defeat your system. Fortunately, it wasn’t any of my staff that created the loophole.”