Central Los Angeles : BEEPER WARS

A nonprofit group that aids tenants facing evictions claims it is the victim of beeper hacking.

The Unlawful Detainer Assistance Project, a program of the Los Angeles County Bar Assn., said it had received several threatening phone calls from an unlicensed tenant-assistance paralegal, allegedly angry that the project was taking tenant business away.

After the threatening phone calls were received at the end of August, about 1,000 customers of Nationwide and MobileCom paging service received a bogus page with the number of the assistance project, and hundreds of unwanted calls started coming in to the office, flooding the lines, according to Bar association spokesman Eric Roy.

Bar association officials said the phony pages and the flood of calls from pager service customers continued for two weeks.

“It appears to be an intentional annoyance thing,” said Harry Korosis, technical area manager for MobileCom. Korosis said this was the first instance he had heard of mass paging used as a harassment tool.

Said Roy: “It jammed our phones so perspective customers couldn’t call us, and we lost business.”

Although the phony pages have stopped, the Bar association is looking into how to crack down on unlicensed tenant assistance groups, which often target non-English-speaking people who are faced with eviction.

These paralegals charge clients from $150 to $500 and present poorly prepared documents to the courts and often file bankruptcy claims without clients’ approval, said Patricia Andreani, the directing attorney for the Bar association’s assistance project. “This ruins the tenant’s credit and it stays on their record for the rest of their life,” Andreani said. “It’s an unnecessary stop in an eviction.”

The Unlawful Detainer Assistance Project offers low-cost legal assistance to people who do not qualify for free assistance from the government but are still poor, Andreani said.