Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!bbn!mit-eddie!killer!vector!nobody From: andrew@frip.gwd.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Fraudulent use of 900 #'s Message-ID: Date: 15 Jan 89 03:07:19 GMT Sender: chip@vector.UUCP Lines: 24 Approved: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-Submissions-To: telecom@bu-cs.bu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 29, message 6 "Now exactly who do you think ends up paying for telephone fraud???? The telephone company ... Try to run a business that loses money and see how long it lasts." This is incorrect. When a customer refuses to pay for thousands of dollars worth of prefix 976 calls, the telephone company doesn't lose money. They just don't make more money. They end up with the same amount of money as though those calls had never been made. The account that runs the 976 service doesn't get their cut. It's not as though the telephone company buys telephone calls at wholesale and resells them at retail. Virtually all their costs are fixed costs. The incremental cost of placing a 976 call is zip. The newspapers are full of this "the phone company loses millions of dollars on fraud" stuff. It ain't so. (None of the above should be construed as support for perpetrators of telephone fraud. Especially when they bill to my phone number. Hang 'em high!) -=- Andrew Klossner (uunet!tektronix!hammer!frip!andrew) [UUCP] (andrew%frip.gwd.tek.com@relay.cs.net) [ARPA]