New rules haven't eliminated slamming

Like last year's crop of contestants on the television show "Survivor," telecom slamming just won't fade away.

Slamming - the practice of switching a customer's phone service without permission - has been around for as long as competition in the telecommunications market. For years it had not been seen as a serious enough problem to warrant a major crackdown.

Late last year that changed when the Federal Communications Commission passed antislamming rules, which advocates hope will put an end to the practice.

While no hard-and-fast numbers exist on who gets slammed or how often, the consensus is that consumers and small businesses are the easiest marks. After all, large companies have telecom managers who deal exclusively with telecom services and billing and aren't likely to be fooled.

However, the branch offices of major corporations and remote workers don't have the same kind of expertise and are targeted by slammers.

Doug Hogue, telecommunications project manager for UniFirst, a uniform supplier in Wilmington, Mass., with more than 130 locations in the U.S. and Canada, says there are two tactics slammers use to try to switch the telecom services to UniFirst's branch offices.

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The first is to tell the branch office that UniFirst's head office has authorized the slammer to switch the branch office's telecom service and request the branch office to merely confirm the change.

The second is to send out rebate checks that have a small-print clause authorizing a switch of telecommunications provider.

Hogue says the slamming isn't a major concern for UniFirst. If the branch office doesn't notice its telecom service has been switched, UniFirst has a telecom analyst who looks at the company's phone bills to spot anomalies.

When UniFirst notices a slamming, the company typically calls the provider that benefited from the slam to get a credit and have service switched back to the original provider.

"That's pretty much all we can do," Hogue says. "Going to the FCC takes too much time and money."

Bill Moore, telecommunications manager for The Museum of Modern Art in New York, says MOMA has one or two of its remote lines slammed every few months.

"It's nothing major," he says. "It's more on the annoyance level."

Like Hogue, Moore says the slams are easy to spot. Moore gets his phone bills on compact disk and can run reports on the calls. If he finds any that aren't billed by Verizon or AT&T, MOMA's providers of choice, he knows there's something wrong.

Moore says getting compensation from slammers has never been a problem. But getting an explanation of how MOMA got slammed is another story.

"They always have an excuse, or say they don't know how it occurred," he says.

The biggest slamming culprits are usually third-party firms hired by the telecommunications providers to drum up business, says Tom Nolle, president of telecom consultancy CIMI Corp., and a columnist for Network World. Because the companies get compensated for every new customer they sign up, there's plenty of incentive for them to use every trick in the book to get consumers and businesses to switch providers.

One way companies can prevent switching of their phone service is to get Primary Interexchange Carrier (PIC) freezes put on their lines. PIC freezes mean that service on lines can't be switched without written authorization.

However, Hogue notes it can be difficult to get PIC freezes for all company lines because the freezes must be ordered from the local voice provider, and a geographically diverse company, such as UniFirst, has hundreds of lines with many providers.

Also, a line with a PIC freeze on it can still be changed without written authorization if an independent third-party company is on a call where a change of service is approved, Nolle notes. The third-party companies are authorized by the FCC to approve changes on lines that have a PIC freeze on them.

"If you're on a call discussing your service and a third party is also online, you're probably having your service switched," Nolle says.

He says slams may be increasing slightly because competition in the telecom market is fiercer than ever.

But Marie Breslin, director of federal regulatory with Verizon, says federal and state officials have been cracking down on slammers the past two years, decreasing the frequency of slams.

The latest legislation, passed in November, states that slamming victims do not have to pay any charges resulting from a slam for up to 30 days after they have been slammed. After 30 days, they must pay charges to their authorized phone company at the customer's standard rates.

If a customer has paid a bill, the slamming company must pay the customer's authorized provider 150% of what the customer paid to the slammer and must pay 50% of what was paid back to the customer.

"There are a lot of financial disincentives for slammers right now," Breslin says. "This should lead to less slamming. My personal hope is that slamming will become a complete nonissue within the next six to 12 months."

New rules haven't eliminated slamming

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