May 28, 2004

Contact: NCL Communications Department

Crooks Find New Way to Reach Out and Touch Victims

          Relay services were designed to help people with hearing or speech difficulties use the telephone. Now there is a new way to make relay calls – through the Internet. While Internet relay services are very convenient for many hearing or speech-impaired people, some enterprising con artists are also taking advantage of them to contact potential victims.

Relay calls are placed through a special operator. Traditionally, a hearing or speech-impaired person types the words she wants to say on the keyboard of a device called a TTY, which is attached to her phone. She transmits the words to the operator, who speaks them to the person she is calling, then converts that person’s response to text, which displays on the caller’s TTY. There is no charge to either the caller or the called party; telephone companies that provide these services are compensated through the federally administered Telecommunications Relay Services Fund.

          Internet relay services work the same way, but the caller uses a computer instead of a phone and TTY. As crooks in other countries have discovered, Internet relay calls can be made to US telephone numbers from anywhere in the world for free. So they’ve started to exploit the service, calling US businesses to order goods and services and providing phony or stolen credit card numbers for payment.

          Relay service operators are caught in the middle. Functioning almost as human telephone wires, their job is to transmit exactly what is said. Relay calls are required to be 100 percent confidential. The operators can’t interfere with the calls or interject their opinions in the conversations, even if they suspect that scams are occurring, and they can’t report their suspicions to anyone.

          Some businesses are reacting by refusing to take any relay calls, but that’s the wrong approach to the problem. This is a vital service that people genuinely rely on – and that everyone benefits from because it enables us to communicate with each other regardless of our physical abilities.

          There are positive steps that businesses can take to protect themselves from fraudulent orders, no matter how they’re placed.

• Think twice about completing the transaction if the person offers multiple credit card numbers for payment.
• Ask for the person’s address and telephone number.
• And probably most important, verify through the credit card system that the credit card is valid before shipping the merchandise or providing the service.

          AT&T, MCI and Sprint, the major Internet relay service providers, are now having some success in stopping abusers by blocking certain Internet protocol addresses. Only time will tell how long it will take clever con artists to get around these blocks, however.    

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