Published: March 26, 2008 11:26 am         

Attempt to swap phone charges reported by sheriff

If you get a call from a jail, you might want to think twice about accepting it, Cooke County Sheriff Mike Compton said Tuesday.

Compton said criminals sometimes use jail telephones to convince the person on the other end that they need them to dial a sequence of numbers in order to make a call. Sometimes the prisoner pretends he or she just got arrested and is desperate to arrange a pickup for a child stranded at school.

Others claim to be telephone company technicians “testing lines.”

The bottom line is the scammer convinces the victim to dial a number which transfers charges for the prisoner’s calls to the victim.

“Dialing numbers such as *72 or 72# allows criminals to use your telephone to make long distance calls. The calls are billed back to your number,” he said.

So far, local authorities haven’t heard reports of this scam in the Cooke County area, but Compton said it showed up in Wills Point, a community east of Dallas.

Some might wonder why a person would agree to pay for a call from a jail if they don’t know anyone who is in custody. Compton said it isn’t hard to understand how a person could be duped into accepting the charges.

“A lot of times, the inmates will intentionally disguise their voice and the person getting the call will think someone they know is in jail. This might concern parents with teenage kids, for example,” he said.

Inmates at the Cooke County Jail do have access to phone lines during certain times.

“The phones are turned on around 8 a.m. and are turned off at 9 p.m.,” Compton said.

He pointed out that the calls prisoners make to friends, attorneys and family are fairly expensive but that the county gets some of the proceeds from the calls.

“The money helps defray the costs of running the jail,” Compton said.

Having access to a telephone also prevents prisoners from claiming they were not allowed to make a call.

“It allows them to contact their attorney or their family,” he said.

Since prisoners are allowed to use phones there is a potential for problems such as the phone scam, he said.

Compton had some advice for residents.

“People need to know that if they get a call from jail and they don’t have a person in that jail or don’t know the person who is calling from jail, they need to notify me,” he said.