They See You Paying $16 a Minute

What does a tiny island in the South Seas--a place where canned coconut cream is a major export, and the national budget is subsidized by the sale of stamps--have to do with Miss Cleo, psychic superstar?

The island in question is Niue (pronounced NEW-ee), and it has figured in Access Resource Services’ quest for new ways to make and collect money from its psychic hotlines.

AT&T; is pulling out of the business of billing for 900 numbers, and Access--the company represented by Miss Cleo in television ads--must find another way to bill. It is trying to convince callers to use their credit cards, charging a monthly fee of $29.95 for 30 minutes.

But Jon Sorensen, a spokesman for the New York State Consumer Protection Board, says Access also has directed some callers to use an international phone number that would take their calls all the way to Niue and back to the United States.

The resulting per-minute charges ranged from $7 to $16, he says.

Niue is located 1,500 miles from New Zealand, between Tonga, Samoa and the Cook Islands. It is tiny--half-again as big as the District of Columbia--but still has had its infamous moments.

Niue has been accused of fostering money laundering, and has also been linked to a scam in which software, planted in computers, took control of modems and made calls to porn lines with numbers in Niue, unbeknownst to the owners of the computers.

It also has been a favorite of some telemarketers who run porn or psychic hotlines.

This is how it works: The companies contract with Niue to take their calls. With fewer than 2,000 people--and 400 telephone lines--Niue has no city or area codes, so every number on the island is 683 and four digits. “It would be easy for the naive or ignorant to imagine they were making a local call,” according to a report on the phenomenon in the Economist magazine.

The companies split the profits with the Niue telephone company. Apparently Access, like other such companies, merely routed the calls through Niue and back to the United States on a leased line, where they were then dispatched to psychics around the country.

The charges show up on telephone bills as ordinary international calls.

Andre Marmen, a psychic for Access, says he received calls from people who had reached him this way last fall. One woman thought the call was covered under her 5-cent-a-minute long distance plan.

Sean Moynihan, a lawyer for Access, says the company may have experimented with international calls, but “that’s not something the company is going to go into.”