It looks like Nicolaos Kantartzis will be using a payphone for the next few months. A prison payphone. The Huffington Post and numerous other sources report on this Washington, D.C., payphone owner turned jailbird:
“Nicolaos Kantartzis pleaded guilty in September to using more than 100 pay phones to make phantom calls. Because the calls are free to legitimate users, the party getting the call pays costs that include a cut for the pay phone operator. Kantartzis, 63, was paid each time his phones rang the numbers, even though most calls lasted only a few seconds.” Read more at the Huffington Post…
This seems like a low-level scam that could continue forever, unless the perpetrator gets greedy. The scam is also not new.
I first spotted the case of Daniel David and and Scott D. Nisbett in May, 2005, after the case had been in the courts for a few years. Those two were sentenced to 30 months in prison for their involvement in a similar crime, though the deviousness of their operation seems more elaborate than the Nicolaos Kantartzis scam.
In April, 2011, came word of indictments against Jeff Frost and Colin Nordstrom for a similar scheme to defraud owners of toll-free numbers out of FCC-mandated dial-around compensation. Those two made millions but could face decades in jail for their crimes.
Kantartzis’ sentence seems lenient compared to earlier cases.
Stories like this help explain why some owners of toll-free numbers block calls from payphones. Even without the risk of robbery by these type of robo-dialing bandits it simply might not make sense for business owners to compensate payphone owners 50¢ for serving as the middle-man for incoming calls.
On the other hand, as a payphone user myself I have occasionally faced the seeming indignity of being unable to reach certain toll-free services. In October I was surprised to find that TellME, an advertising-supported news and entertainment service from Microsoft, was unavailable to payphone users.
More recently I was surprised to find that payphone users attempting direct access to 511, the New York State traffic and travel telephone portal, could only reach that service from Verizon and EHUC payphones. In the case of 511 there is a workaround, though: To reach 511 from a non-Verizon or non-EHUC payphone you can dial 888-465-1169. The only pitfall of this workaround is that (amazingly) some payphones still are not programmed to recognize the 888 area code as a toll-free exchange, making many legitimate toll-free numbers unreachable from those phones.
The dial-around compensation scams also serve to remind us that “Toll Free” calls are, of course, not really toll free. The owner of the toll free number pays for the call, and if the call comes from a payphone then the owner of that phone gets a cut of the action in the form of dial-around compensation.
But toll free calls are not really free for most cell phone users, either. When calling from a cell phone the caller also pays for the call by using minutes on their calling plan, possibly even incurring overage charges if a customer service session runs too long.
The only way a toll free call is truly toll free for the caller is when the call is made from a payphone, or from a plan that allows for unlimited calling time.
Gaming the system via auto-dialing payphones is obviously wrong and anyone doing what Nicolaos Kantartzis and the others did will probably get caught eventually. On the other hand, if you want to help support your local payphone provider without incurring any cost to yourself then maybe use a payphone the next time you need to call a toll-free number.