The World of Computer Software/World_Of_Computer_Software-02-387-Vol-3of3.iso/t/tc13-145.zip/TC13-145.TXT

Text File | 1993-03-06 | 24KB | 560 lines

TELECOM Digest     Tue, 2 Mar 93 23:51:30 CST    Volume 13 : Issue 145

Index To This Issue:                     Moderator: Patrick A. Townson

    Re: Gotta Love GTE (Sean Malloy)
    RE: Gotta Love GTE (Charlie Mingo)
    Re: Gotta Love GTE (Ed Greenberg)
    Re: Gotta Love GTE (Justin Leavens)
    Re: Gotta Love GTE (Gene LeDuc)
    Re: Gotta Love GTE (Tony Harminc)
    Re: A Pager Question [or Does This Get Killed?] (Mike Berger)
    Re: A Pager Question [or Does This Get Killed?] (John Gilbert)
    Re: TRT Being Bought/What is IDB Communications? (Eric Weaver)
    Re: TRT Being Bought/What is IDB Communications? (Hank Nussbacher)
    Re: TRT Being Bought/What is IDB Communications? (Don E. Kimberlin)
    Re: Long Distance: The Next Best Thing to Praying There (Roy Smith)
    Re: Long Distance: The Next Best Thing to Praying There (H. Hallikainen)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Sean Malloy)
Subject: Re: Gotta Love GTE
Date: 2 Mar 1993 09:00:48 -0600
Organization: Texas A&M University, College Station, TX


[e-mail] (Paul Robinson) writes:

>> What kind of racket is this that companies can just cash your
>> check for whatever amount they deem necessary?

> While I have heard rumors that the Gestapo Internal Revenue Service
> has done this, I've never seen it in action. :)

Well, I'll jump on this tangent.  My uncle is a collection agent for
the IRS and has told me some rather interesting stories about what the
IRS can do to you if they think you owe them money ...

I've heard of them seizing bank accounts, garnishing paychecks (child
support payments, etc) and convincing your local banker to let you
have a third mortgage on your home, but I've never heard of them
changing the amount on a check.

They do, however, have some questionable tactics that they use
regularly.  One that springs to mind is that they need no court
document (warrant, or whatever) to seize private property "as long as
the agent doesn't have to cross a roofline to take possession".

And the roofline provision is a recent (circa 1990) addition.  Agents
used to grab a member of the local constabulary (presumably to prevent
harm to the IRS agent from the delinquent taxpayer), enter a person's
home or business and cart out valuables until they had taken the
equivalent of the money owed.  All without having to convince a court
that you do indeed owe what the IRS says you do.  Is due process dead?
Looks that way.

And if you're wondering what due process has to do with telecommunications,
talk to Steve Jackson of Austin, TX, or read some of the documents on
ftp.eff.org.

Sidenote: My uncle is not a nice guy.  IRS work suits him.... ;-)


Sean C. Malloy  -  Texas A&M University  -  [e-mail]


[Moderator's Note: I think you will find most bill collectors are
quite curteous and follow the law closely when compared to the IRS.  PAT]

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Charlie Mingo)
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 1993 18:11:32 -0500
Subject: Re: Gotta Love GTE


[e-mail] (Graham Toal) writes:

>  Moderator Noted:

>> Graham, there has to be *intent*, and courts have said intent was
>> very unlikely when the payment was handled through a remittance center
>> getting a few hundred thousand payments daily. What do you think they
>> do there? I mean, do you think they actually look at the check, the
>> coupon and say let's conspire against Graham and get his lousy seven
>> dollars?  Carelessness, I'll accept. A conspiracy, criminal or
>> otherwise is a bit much to swallow.  PAT]

>  First of all, if someone changed the amount written on a cheque,
> there is no defence in the world can show there wasn't intent
> to defraud. Banks do *not* accidentally pay out a figure that
> is not written on a cheque. They go by what is written on the
> cheque, not on the pay-in slip.

If a check has the amount to be paid encoded on the bottom in magnetic
ink, the bank will go by that, usually without checking what is
written above.  (If they bothered to verify the accuracy of the
magnetic encoding, it would be just as fast to enter the amount
manually.)

The GTE clerk did not "change" the amount written on the check; she
just encoded a value on the bottom which was different from the amount
written above.  Yes, this is a mistake, and _if you could prove they
were doing this deliberately and with intent to defraud_, it could
even amount to a crime.

> If a low-level worker deliberately tampered with a cheque, it's very
> unlikely they did it entirely off their own bat.  Their supervisor
> must have known and given approval.

That is just speculation.  The burden of proof is on the person
alleging fraud, and in criminal cases, the proof must be beyond a
reasonable doubt.  Simply saying "very unlikely" or "must have known"
is not proof of anything.

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Ed Greenberg)
Subject: Re: Gotta Love GTE
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: Tue, 2 Mar 1993 17:50:37 GMT


Sorry,

Banks most certainly go by what is written on the check, but with
large depositors they go by what is INSCRIBED in magnetic ink, BY THE
DEPOSITOR on the check.  Thus, the depositor is supposed to read what
is on the check and inscribe that number in magnetic ink on the
bottom, under the signature.

When we processed payments at a bank where I worked, we split the
checks and payment tickets.  We then inscribed the checks from the
check amounts, and generated a tape and total.  The date entry clerk
then entered payments from the payment tickets, and created another
total.  When the two totals balanced the batch was in balance.  IF
they did not balance, the amount on the check was taken, not the
amount on the payment ticket, and we did not even have access to the
amount owing.

We also would occasionally find a check that was mis-inscribed.  This
would send the batch back for correction.  The only way to get an
error past us, (well, one way) would be for the inscriber to make an
error in the same amount as the payor had written in on his check.


Edward W. Greenberg  | Home: [phone] | [e-mail]
1600 Stokes St. #24  | Work: [phone] | DoD#: 0357
San Jose, CA  95126  | Fax:  [phone] | KM6CG (ex WB2GOH)

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Justin Leavens)
Subject: Re: Gotta Love GTE
Date: 2 Mar 1993 09:59:28 -0800
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA


Thanks to everyone who responded to my story about GTE cashing my
girlfriend's payment check for more than the check was actually
written for.

Comments were pretty much in two varieties:

1. Contact the DA, PUC, and bank authorities and see if legal action is
   possible/necessary, and

2. GTE processes its own checks and it was probably a clerical error
   (although most everyone seemed to wonder whether it really was an
   error) and the bank should eat the error (let them try to collect
   from GTE).

A follow-up call to the bank (after consultation with my attorney)
resulted this time in a credit to her account for the overcharge.
Again, the amount was small, but as many responses pointed out: What
if it resulted in a rent or mortgage payment bouncing?

Legal action seems impossible since it's almost impossible to prove
intent to defraud, but I think that a report to the PUC might be a
good idea just in case they get enough of these to establish a
pattern. Otherwise, it's just gotta be chalked up as a clerical error.

Also worth mentioning, a number of responses pointed out that the IRS
is the biggest perpetrator of altering checks, actually physically
altering names and amounts ...


Justin Leavens   Microcomputer Specialist   University of Southern California

------------------------------


Date: Tue, 2 Mar 93 00:54:24 PST
>From: [e-mail] (LCDR Gene LeDuc)
Subject: Re: Gotta Love GTE
Organization: Navy Personnel R&D Center, San Diego


In article <[e-mail]> Pat wrote:

> Did you ever get the check for Telco in the envelope for the Water
> Works by accident, or the check for American Express in the envelope
> going to Diner's Club? Chances are it got cashed anyway.

Reminds me of one day when I was particularly rebellious.  The time
was sometime before The Breakup, when Ma Bell was still Queen.  I was
a freshman at USC and had gotten a higher phone bill than I had
expected (it was legit, I just hadn't kept track of my calls).
Expecting to sabotage The System, I wrote my phone bill check out to
"The Monopoly" and waited for the system to come crashing down.  Not
even a burp.  So ended my rebel days ...


Gene LeDuc ([e-mail])  Navy Personnel R & D Center
San Diego, CA 92152-6800


[Moderator's Note: As you found out, they do not bother to read who
the check is made payable to, nor do they pay attention to dates or
signatures. They *barely* watch the amount, and as writers have
pointed out, not all that closely.  PAT]

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 01 Mar 93 21:52:34 EST
>From: Tony Harminc <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Gotta Love GTE


Graham Toal <[e-mail]> wrote:

> First of all, if someone changed the amount written on a cheque, there
> is no defence in the world can show there wasn't intent to defraud.
> Banks do *not* accidentally pay out a figure that is not written on a
> cheque.  They go by what is written on the cheque, not on the pay-in
> slip.

I had an odd one a few years ago: I saw an ad in a Canadian magazine
from a company with a US address.  The book that interested me was
$40.  I sent a cheque for this amount (in Canadian dollars,
naturally), and soon after received the book.  Some time later I
noticed a cheque had cleared my account for an amount I didn't
recognize.  Investigation showed that someone (presumably the payee)
had neatly typed "US" in front of the dollar sign on my cheque.  My
bank paid them the US dollar amount, and charged me the (larger)
Canadian dollar equivalent plus a service charge of $10 or so).

I complained that this was no clerical error, but was outright fraud --
no different than if they had erased the amount I had written and put
in an amount of their choosing.  My bank agreed, and bounced the
cheque back to the California bank marked "altered".  That bank sent
it back again, saying there was nothing wrong with it!  My bank looked
into things a bit harder, and told me that there was no happy medium:
either I could refuse payment on the cheque entirely (which I had no
wish to do since I had bought the book), or they could charge me the
larger amount, though they graciously offered to waive the service
charge.  I told them I considered they were assisting in a fraud and
that I would be in touch with the police.  They changed their tune
very quickly, and sent the cheque back for one last trip through the
clearing system, marked in large friendly letters "PAYABLE IN CANADIAN
DOLLARS".  It did clear for the right amount.


Tony Harminc

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Mike Berger)
Subject: Re: A Pager Question [or Does This Get Killed?]
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 1993 18:39:51 GMT
Organization: U of Il. School of Life Sciences


In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Paul
Robinson) wrote:

> I want to know if there are still short-distance devices available for
> paging people without having to pay monthly service charges.  Any
> device available commercially would have to have some kind of
> selectable code so that it's not readily triggered by false alarms.

Uniden had a small system for use in buildings that could page several
individual codes.  I'm sure there are others.

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (John Gilbert)
Subject: Re: A Pager Question [or Does This Get Killed?]
Organization: Motorola
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1993 15:22:09 GMT


In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail]
(Paul Robinson) writes:

> I want to know if there are still short-distance devices available for
> paging people without having to pay monthly service charges.  Any
> device available commercially would have to have some kind of
> selectable code so that it's not readily triggered by false alarms. >

Yes.  There are low cost systems available that use CB frequencies.
Range would be short and interference might be a problem.  I think
Radio Shack offered one of these systems at one time.

Motorola offers a product called "People Finder."  This is a low power
desktop transmitter/paging encoder that can be used to set off
tone/numeric/voice pagers on UHF business band frequencies.  You must
be licensed. Reliablility would be much better, and cost would be
higher than the RS system. Motorola sales can be reached at 800-247-2346.

Motorola also offers a product through the "Radius" distributor
channel that signals voice pagers and has a lower cost than the
"People Finder."


John Gilbert    [e-mail]

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Eric Weaver)
Subject: Re: TRT Being Bought/What is IDB Communications?
Organization: SONY Advanced Video Technology Center San Jose, CA USA
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1993 17:47:13 GMT


Paul Robinson writes [Questions about "who is IDB"?]:

I know IDB as a satellite broadcast service company which can send
uplink trucks out to events; I had them give a quote for a concert we
are thinking of doing.

My rolodex lists them in Culver City.


Eric Weaver  Sony AVTC  677 River Oaks Pkwy, MS 35  SJ CA 95134  408 944-4904
& Chief Engineer, KFJC 89.7 Foothill College, Los Altos Hills CA 94022

------------------------------

Organization: Bar-Ilan University Computing Center, Israel
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1993 08:41:36 IST
>From: Hank Nussbacher <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: TRT Being Bought/What is IDB Communications?


We in Israel have been using IDB for the past two years as out
satellite vendor for the USA side of our link to the NSFnet (via PSI).
We started at 64kb and now have the link running at 128kb.  IDB's
prices have been consistently cheaper than the prices quoted to us by
places like MCI, AT&T or Sprint.

I am on their quarterly brochure mailing list.  It would appear that
IDB started out as a supplier of satellite communications for rock
concerts and other one time affairs where an earth station had to be
set up for a few hours of broadcast such as the Superbowl, the
Olympics, etc.  They are almost non-existant in the fiber area and
haveso far only been in satellite communications.  They appear to be
aggresive and this latest deal just shows it.


Hank Nussbacher    Israel

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 02 Mar 93 02:54 GMT
>From: Donald E. Kimberlin <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: TRT Being Bought/What is IDB Communications?


In article <Digest v13, iss130>, Paul Robinson asks:

> So, has anyone heard of IDB before?

Yup.

Preceding that, he posted:

> The office I work out of gets telex service from a company called TRT,
> which had, a few years ago, bought the FTCC telex company and merged
> with it.  We recently received a press release from them dated 2/9,
> which said:


> On January 25, 1993, IDB Communications announced that it had
> entered into an agreement for the acquisition of all of the stock of
> TRT communications.

And, he quoted a lot of the press hype for IDB, including:

> - IDB has been in this business since 1985;
> - IDB bought World Communications (Worldcom) which gives it a
> satelite broadcast operation;

and:

> - France Telecom owns almost 15% of TRT, this deal doesn't affect
> that part;

Phew!  Now, let's sort all that out.  What IDB has done is to buy into
significant chunks of some very old companies that most Americans
never heard of ... companies that had once been called the
International Record Carriers.  These firms had all been international
telegraph companies, some dating back to even before the turn of the
century.  Here's a rundown on those names:

FTCC Communications had for years been the French Telegraph Cable
Company, with submarine telegraph cables running between France and
the U.S., the earliest routes actually running up to the Welsh coast
of England, and getting repeaters in them to reach back to the U.S.,
dating from the late 1890's.  Named for its original company manager,
one Monsieur Pouyer-Quartier, French Cable was identified by the
routing code "PQ" in submarine telegraphy, a moniker that stuck with
it for decades after the name change to FTCC.  The ultimate ownership
was the French PTT's telegraph department, which ownership remains
today.  TRT bought what was available of FTCC, and IDB ultimately
bought the resultant combination.

TRT Telecommunications was originally the Tropical Radiotelegraph
Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of United Fruit of Boston.
Tropical innovated the placement of radio on ships before WW I, and
used it to direct and divert loads of bananas to the U.S. port with
the best prices.  Over the years, Tropical grew with and into the
Central American nations, first putting radiotelegraph operations to
the plantations, then becoming the operators of the international
public telegraph service, and in many of the Central American nations,
the operators of the international public telephone service.  Tropical
operated its U.S. radio plants at Pearl River, LA (still there for
ship radio, which is now fading rapidly from the scene) and Ft.
Lauderdale, FL (which is today solely a wireline operation, using
international satellite and cable channels).  Tropical had a number of
early tie-ins with RCA, due to early developments it had made in radio
communications, too.

World Communications is a portion of the former ITT World
Communications, which had been ITT's merger of its holdings in All
American Cable and Radio, Mackay Marine's ship radio operations, Press
Wireless, Globe Wireless, and the Federal Radiotelegraph Company ...
all historic names in early commercial radio communications.  ITT had
sold its ITT Worldcom to Western Union for a few years, which stripped
off Worldcom's international telegraph operations, and sold the
private line and special services operations to a group of Swiss
investors.  IDB got into Worldcom through a later investment door.

Which leaves the question: Who then is IDB?  Generally, it's a
Houston-based group of investors who first started up with mobile
satellite uplink rentals to U.S. television broadcasters ...
essentially a "remote truck" for a ball game or other sports event, or
some news gathering.  IDB spread out into the various bits it found
available, a lot of which was in the hands of the firms previously
described.  But, as your report indicates, IDB itself is a relative
newcomer to the field.

There are three other names of the "old days" of International Record
Carriers (IRC's) still around, but buried:

RCA Globecomm (earlier named RCA Communications, or RCAC, and
originally the core of the Radio Corporation of America that was
founded in 1919 to purchase the assets of American Marconi and assume
control of the expropriated properties of Telefunken in the U.S.
during WW I), was purchased by MCI and forms a core part of MCI
International.

WUI, Inc., (originally the Cable Division of Western Union and, in
1963 becoming Western Union International when WUTCo finally sold its
Cable Division to the public as ordered by the FCC in 1940) has a
history in submarine telegraph cables that dates clear back to the
original 1858 telegraph cable across the Atlantic, laid by the former
Anglo-American Cable Company, founded by Cyrus Field with British
capital when Western Union would not invest in it, but bought it up as
soon as it proved commercially successful.  (Western Union had a grand
project underway to reach Europe overland by going up through Alaska,
laying a short cable across the Bering Strait, and then an overland
route across the entire expanse of Siberia to Moscow, then Finland,
and around the Baltic Sea to Denmark, to interface to European
telegraph networks.  The WUTCo plan was abandoned when Anglo-American
proved it worked.)

By 1940, WUTCo had a network of thousands and thousands of miles of
submarine telegraph cables reaching all around the globe, as had
England's Eastern Telegraph and related companies, the Siemens
Brothers of Germany with Deutsche Atlantik Telegraphgesellschaft, the
Great Northern Telegraph Company of Denmark, and a host of other
nations and companies.  WUI was also purchased by MCI to form a
significant part of MCI International.

The Trans-Liberia Radiotelegraph Company, a unique and wholly owned
subsidiary of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company at Akron, Ohio,
was formed in the days of HF radio to provide communications between
Firestone and its plantations in Liberia, as well as to handle public
telegrams between the U.S. and Liberia.  Trans-Liberian was rumored to
have had some very interesting WW II missions carried out for the U.S.
government between the U.S. and an American outpost in a prt of the
world that Germany had obvious designs on.  As nearly as I know,
Trans-Liberian still operates from an office in the Firestone HQ
building in Akron, unless it has died in the past few years.  It had
devolved down to largely a room with a few PC's for terminals and a
rented satellite channel to Liberia.

Few people seem to know it, but by the final heyday of the submarine
telegraph cables, there was something in the neighborhood of 400,000
miles of submarine telegraph cable criss-crossing all the oceans of
the world ... enough to reach to the moon and almost back again ...
paralleled by competitive radiotelegraph to most everywhere and a few
landlocked nations that had no ocean shoreline.

So, the endpoint of this story is: Yes, Virginia, There were Heroes of
Communications Who Stalked the Earth before Bell Labs and the
telephone.  However, none of them suited Ma Bell's purposes, so they
were only known to international businesses that had need for their
services.  Today, many of their roots still lie deep in other nations,
and they have established relations that a modern investor like an IDB
or an MCI can use to build modern networks on ... and are doing so.
If you got deep down inside "how it's done" so that a Sprint or an MCI
can get telephone circuits into places like the former Soviet Union,
you'd find a lot of those old International Record Carrier
relationships being made use of.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 02 Mar 93 10:04:05 -0500
>From: [e-mail] (Roy Smith)
Subject: Re: Long Distance: The Next Best Thing to Praying There
Organization: New York University, School of Medicine


> [Moderator's Note: When Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian
> Science passed away (they prefer not to say 'died') in the early years
> of this century, a telephone (live and operating) was buried with her
> in her casket

Where was the demarc?  Hopefully in someplace easier for telco field
service folks to reach in case of trouble ...


Roy Smith <[e-mail]>
Hippocrates Project, Department of Microbiology, Coles 202
NYU School of Medicine, 550 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016

------------------------------

>From: [e-mail] (Harold Hallikainen)
Subject: Re: Long Distance: The Next Best Thing to Praying There
Organization: California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Date: Tue, 02 Mar 1993 20:01:45 GMT


    So, is there a confessions by email address?  Fax seems so
inefficient for text ...


Harold


[Moderator's Note: No, but there is a 900 service you can use, and the
prescribed penance comes when you pay your phone bill.  PAT]

------------------------------

End of TELECOM Digest V13 #145
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