Tricksters Alter Candidate’s Phone Message

Matt Fong, Republican candidate for state treasurer, was the latest victim of election-year dirty tricks Monday, when someone sabotaged his 800 phone number to make it seem that callers were getting a Chinese restaurant, in which a man with a Charlie Chan accent offered Fong’s mother’s won-ton recipe.

“It’s very clear that they’re making fun of my ethnicity,” said Fong, who is Chinese American. “It’s really too bad. . . . I just hope this kind of thing ends.”

Fong, in a statewide television advertising campaign, had asked listeners interested in his proposal for cutting $2 billion in state spending to call 1-800-MATT FONG to find out more about his plan.

But late Monday he discovered that what listeners were getting when they dialed the number was not his voice explaining how to get copies of the plan.

Instead they heard a bad imitation of a Chinese accent. “You want good won-ton soup made by mother, you press 1,” said the man’s voice. “You want vote for me, Matt Fong, for election, press 2.” Fong’s mother, March Fong Eu, was formerly California’s secretary of state.

Fong said someone apparently was able to get access to a string of codes and special numbers that enabled them to erase his message and replace it with the fake. He said he did not know how long the message was on the phone line, but it could have been most of Monday.

Whoever changed the message, he said, was also able to alter the passwords, so when his campaign tried to reprogram the line they were at first unable to do so. The message was finally changed after the telephone company intervened.

Fong said he had no idea who had tampered with his message, but hinted it might have come from the campaign of his opponent, Democrat Phil Angelides.

Susan Baltake, a spokeswoman for the Angelides campaign, denied that the campaign was involved, calling the accusation “ridiculous.”