Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ria!uwovax.uwo.ca!telecom-request From: chron!magic380!edtjda@uunet.uu.net (Joe Abernathy) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Houston Chronicle Cellular Fraud Story Message-ID: Date: 18 Mar 91 19:45:42 GMT Sender: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu Organization: TELECOM Digest Lines: 53 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 217, Message 2 of 8 Patrick writes: > So we have $6 per minute plus the cellular phone charges. Are these > thirty or forty cents per minute each? If you can squeak $7 per minute > out on this, that would be a very generous estimate. Charging for > everything you can think of, how do you begin to approach $10.42 per > call/minute, or $20.83 per minute overall? And that $20.83 per minute > -- using your $30,000 per day estimate -- means the connection is left > up continuously, otherwise the rate per minute of use must of necessity > be even higher. Well, let me stress that it wasn't my estimate, it was that of a company's chief financial officer, who requested anonymity for obvious reasons. I'm not checked out on the tariff structures for international cellular calls, which weren't the focus of my story, but on rechecking my notes I see that he did say clearly that he had to pay double charges on each line. Assuming he was misguided on this point, the only other thing I might offer is that the foreign carriers sometimes add reprehensible charges to a call -- the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been tacking 75 cents a minute onto soldiers' AT&T calls. We have no way of knowing what sort of special fees might be incurred in the actual war zone, whose infrastructure was bombed into the past 100 years by some reports. One wire report said just the rental of a cellular handheld was $5,000 a month right now. One might further assume that it would take some serious combat pay to convince a crew to do maintenance on a cell site -- a not insignificant structure -- in the midst of the world's most intense saturation bombing. Having offered a defense of the man, let me now offer the untold negative side of the story, and then perhaps we can be done. The way that you get federal police agencies -- particularly the U.S. Attorney's office and FBI -- interested in financial crimes is to convince them that a serious financial loss was sustained. And it sometimes turns out that the estimate of loss was higher than the actual proveable loss. We saw this graphically depicted in the case of one Craig Neidorf, and I suspect that it's at work in every case of financial fraud. Best regards to all, Joe Abernathy [Moderator's Note: While you are correct that you must convince the authorities that a crime of some substance has been committed, there is such a thing as crying wolf once too often. Overstating your case can backfire at times. But even ten thousand dollars per day of cellular fraud is pretty outrageous, and overall your story was good. I thank you for sharing with us, and hope you will bring more articles over from the {Chronicle} from time to time. PAT]