Crooks Love Your Phone Bill

How can crooks steal money from you while leaving a paper trail that you review every month? Simple. They use a trail that can be more confusing than a mutual fund prospectus: your monthly telephone bill.

The theft usually shows up as some inexpensive product or as voicemail or paging charges in amounts of $5 to $15. These “third-party” charges are practically invisible among the flotsam of regular and undecipherable telephone charges, and you usually just pay the bill.

This is called “cramming,” a telephone scam that federal regulators say first surfaced about a year ago. If it seems like a lot of work for a paltry take, guess again. The California Public Utilities Commission launched an investigation earlier this year into a firm in Boca Raton, Fla., suspected of billing 300,000 Californians for calling cards they never received. Attach a few bucks to numbers on that scale and cramming stands out as a megabucks swindle.

How do the crammers get your telephone number? Perhaps you sign up in a raffle or a sweepstakes run by the crooks. They also pick off telephone numbers through caller-ID systems.

Your monthly phone bills are part of the problem, says the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is backing the Federal Communications Commission’s proposed “truth in billing” rule that demands clear and simple monthly bills that offer descriptions of every charge and the identities of the billers.

Telephone carriers are in an uproar. An expensive and groundless proposal, they say, one that amounts to intrusive and inflexible micro-management. Rubbish, we say. If the carriers want to maintain their independence, there is work to be done that is long overdue.

Fortunately, some companies are taking action. Bell Atlantic, for example, is changing its bills to a 7-by-11-inch format that looks more like a credit card bill. It includes a plain-English summary of all charges. Why? In part, to cut the costs of answering customer questions about their bills.

Pacific Bell and GTE California have also taken some steps. PacBell has set up an Internet site for fraud complaints. GTE has set up a fraud program designed to flag questionable third-party billers.

It’s a start, but there is much more to do. The telephone carriers can speed up their changes or let the federal regulators lead them by the nose. Meanwhile, we should all be taking a closer look at our phone bills.