Toll-Call Profiteers Make Use of Foreign Connections

Larry Garcia needed work, and the ad sounded good.

“People needed to prepare mailing labels,” read the classified advertisement in an Albuquerque newspaper. “Immediate openings. Call now.” It gave a number with an 809 area code and also noted an “LD toll,” meaning long-distance.

Garcia dialed. The call put him through to the Dominican Republic. The 13-minute recording kept him hanging on with promises of important information, including an address to pursue the job.

The call cost Garcia more than $20--some of which went to the California company that placed the ad.

Federal officials say making a fast buck off international calls has caught on since the government imposed restrictions on 900-number phone services in 1993.

“We are already engaged in looking at ways to stop it, and we will,” said Scott Blake Harris, chief of the Federal Communications Commission’s international bureau.

Harris said U.S. telephone companies have been flooded with complaints about such calls. Carriers in a few foreign countries have caught the FCC’s eye, he said, particularly the Dominican Republic, Guyana and Sao Tome, an island off the west coast of Africa. The foreign carriers sometimes pay U.S. information companies a percentage of what they make off each call.

The FCC is focusing on dial-a-porn companies, by far the biggest winners in the international calling scheme.

The ad Garcia responded to was placed by Top Communications Inc., a telecommunications and direct-marketing services company based in Burbank.

Garcia did get some work--stuffing about 1,200 envelopes with letters telling job-seekers who called the offshore line that there currently was no work available but that they could buy a book telling how to find a job.

Garcia said he was paid about $160, then was told the company did not have another job for him.

Scott Zuckman, the company’s chief executive, said the calls were routed to Santo Domingo because the company does business there and has telecommunications equipment in the city.

He said his company makes about 5 cents a minute from each phone call, or about 65 cents off Garcia’s 13-minute call.

“It may be a lot of money to somebody who doesn’t have any money, and to other people it may be no different than a tank of gas and a new shirt to go on an interview,” he said.