Don't let your phone be hijacked -- Page 2

Troy McLaughlin had his cell phone cloned in late 2003. While his wife was working on a Broadway show, he was commuting between Manhattan and the family's home in Toronto. One day he found his service had been frozen. He called the Canada-based carrier, and the customer service rep wanted to know if he'd been making calls to Cuba and Japan. McLaughlin told him he hadn't. The rep restored the service and promised to correct the bill. It happened a second time. Again, the company reassured him the errant charges would be removed. Instead, his next bill was $750.

"Long story short, my bill gets up to $4,400 with late charges and other calls until they finally canceled it," says McLaughlin, a dancer now based in Vancouver. The upside was that the scammers could no longer run up his bill, he says. But the phone company turned him over to a collection agency.

If it happens to you ...
So what are the odds your line will be hijacked? Probably not that high.

"It's not rampant," says Bloom. "There are scam artists around. There always have been and probably always will be."

Still there are things you can do to minimize the risk and limit the damage scammers can do. If you're hit with charges that aren't yours and suspect someone has hijacked your line, consider suspending service, getting another phone (if it's a cell) or switching carriers until the problem is resolved.

Don't pay for charges that aren't yours. "Once you've paid a bill, you're in the position of trying to get money back, which is not as advantageous as not having paid it to begin with," says Susan Grant, director of the National Fraud Information Center.

But some victimized consumers claim they are ignored when they report bogus calls and attempt to correct their bills. While some phone companies are sympathetic and drop the charges, others try to collect, cut off service, call in collections agencies or threaten legal action.

Claridge says that her long-distance company was in the process of suing her for $8,000 in scammed charges. "It was a tough time," she says.

She credits local media coverage with convincing the company to drop the charges from her bill. "All of a sudden, one of the TV stations picked up the story, and we were all being interviewed," she says.

If you find charges on your bill that aren't yours, "the first thing you do is contact the phone company," says Alan M. Caplan, one of several attorneys representing consumers in a class-action suit against a phone company.

Contact the company by phone, but always follow up with a letter. Do it right away and send the letter certified with a return receipt requested so that you can prove they received it.

"Each month that it appears on the bill, send the same letter," says Caplan, a partner in the San Francisco firm of Bushnell, Caplan & Fielding, LLP.

If the charges are still there in two months, mail a certified letter to the public utility commission in your state, he says. And "send a copy to the phone company, so they know you're not letting go of this.

"And if it's not gone by the third month, you should copy a letter to the Better Business Bureau," he says.

You can also contact the office of the attorney general in your state.

If the phone company sends you to a collection agency, "do the same writing campaign," Caplan says. "Warn them -- and copy all your letters to the phone company -- that if your credit is impaired in any way, you will hold them responsible for any loss you suffer."

When the usual options failed, some consumers had to get creative.

McLaughlin made more than 30 calls to his cell carrier to resolve his bill. When that got him nowhere, he called the consumer reporter at his local TV station. He received a call from a phone company vice president that evening, he says. A few weeks later, the company discovered the glitch: A security feature that was supposed to protect his phone from cloning had not been activated before it was sold it to him. "They finally acknowledged that the calls weren't mine," he says.

McLaughlin's advice: Don't pay, keep disputing and, if nothing else works, "try the media."

Dana Dratch is a freelance writer based in Atlanta.