Spokane Couple Gets Bell Rung By Collect Call

E.T. would never phone home with these rip-off rates.

Beverly and Greg Strate wish they hadn’t. The couple is levitating over the shocker of a telephone bill that recently arrived in the mail.

One two-minute collect call from Post Falls to their North Spokane home 20 miles away: $12.86.

“I was just livid,” says Beverly, a secretary at Whitworth College. Greg is a commercial banker for Washington Trust.

“For that much money I could have filled the car with gas and driven home, delivered the message in person and driven back,” she adds.

The couple made the call during a shopping trip at the Post Falls outlet stores. They decided to stay for dinner and used the pay telephone at a gas station to let their two sons know.

The Strates are hardly the first to get fleeced by electronic highway robbers. Each year, thousands of high rate complaints are filed against alternative telephone service providers.

The majority of gripes are aimed at Oncor Communications, the same company responsible for the Strates’ bloated two-minute charge.

You may never have heard of Oncor, but its fees are often double or triple what the big companies charge.

A collect call from Post Falls to Spokane via AT&T, for example, costs $2.64 for the first minute and 34 cents for each additional minute.

Complaints on file with the Idaho Public Utilities Commission blame Oncor for charging anywhere from $3 to $5 a minute and up. One Idahoan says Oncor dinged him $90 for an 18-minute telephone call.

Beverly tried to find out how these phone bandits get away with such stratospheric charges.

“I called Oncor and talked to a guy who told me his company charges what it costs to provide the service,” she says. “I said, ‘Oh, yeah, sure, sorry to bother you.”’

Being a curious fellow, I decided to take up Oncor’s offer on the top of the Strates’ bill.

“For questions,” it reads, “call 1-800…” That number, unfortunately, is only good for non-journalist questions. Newspaper snoops must dial a Maryland number, an Oncor employee told me.

But all that got me was some guy’s voice mail. I hope he doesn’t call me back using Oncor’s service. He’ll have to sell his children to pay the bill.

Deb at the US West pay telephone division, however, was extremely helpful. When I could get her to stop laughing, that is.

“Twelve dollars for two minutes?” she says between guffaws. “Oh, my gosh.”

According to Deb, private property owners decide which long distance service to use on pay telephones installed at their stores or gas stations.

There are scores of carriers to choose from with rates ranging from ridiculous to reasonable. The higher the rate most often means a fatter cut for the landlord.

It’s easier to get bilked in Idaho, where long-distance rates are not regulated. Washington telephone rates are capped at 25 percent above AT&T.

Deb says you should dial 00 before making a pay phone call. That connects you to the carrier’s operator who must reveal the costs.

The catch is that this is a whole lot of bother, which is why so many consumers get bamboozled. “My daughter called me collect from from her school and I accepted the charge,” says Deb. “It was $7 and I should know better.”

There are ways to outfox the phone pirates:

You can buy a pre-paid calling card that offers fixed, per-minute long-distance rates.

You can dial 1-800-COLLECT, which hooks you into MCI’s system, or 1-800-CALLATT to use AT&T services.

Or you can skip the whole muddled mess and buy a cellular telephone. Which brings us to the most painful part of this tale.

“We had a cell phone in the car the whole time, but Greg didn’t want to use it,” says Beverly. “He thought the call would be too expensive.”

, DataTimes