THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 6, 1996 TAG: 9609060498
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JEFF COLLINS, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
DATELINE: SANTA ANA, CALIF. LENGTH: 42 lines
Tracy Mehew still talks about the strange phone number that appeared on her pager a few weeks ago, a number with an 809 area code.
Thinking it was a wrong number, she dialed it to inform the caller that the page didn't get to the right person. She got a recording about male impotency.
``I thought someone was playing a joke on me,'' said Mehew, 26, marketing manager for a Long Beach, Calif., interior-design company. ``It was really funny at first, but after 10 seconds, it got really rude and I hung up. . . . The more I thought about it, I got really offended.''
She'd been scammed, phone-company officials said.
For nearly three months, 809 numbers have appeared on thousands of beepers nationwide, the officials said, luring pager users to return what appears to be a domestic call. Instead, they end up dialing the Caribbean island of Antigua and getting billed up to $25 aminute.
Some calls go to the ``Impotency Infoline.'' Others to the ``Gay Hot Party Line.'
It is ``the latest permutation in a series of phone scams,'' said Larry Cox, a GTE spokesman.
Like junk mail, junk faxes, junk e-mail and telemarketing calls, junk pages are the newest wrinkle in American life. But they can be far more costly, officials said.
Cox speculated that automated dialing machines call numbers in sequence, detecting whether the call is answered by a voice or a pager. When it's the latter, they initiate the page.
Phone officials say junk-beep companies go offshore to escape U.S. restrictions.
GTE will credit customers' bills if they call to complain, but only for the first instance, Cox said.
``Don't return pages to areas where you don't recognize the area code,'' Cox said.
KEYWORDS: PAGERS FRAUD by CNB