MASS TELEPHONE PICKPOCKET

One of the symptoms of living in a predator state, a place where everday business is simply turned over to ways to relieve citizens of their wealth without providing any compensatory worth, is having to regularly defend yourself from daily petty crime.

Three months ago DD got a new telephone number, service provided by AT&T. With the new monthly bill came regular evidence of new and novel rip-off.

The first bill had two three-way call charges, at a $1.99/call. DD doesn't make three-way calls. Never has, never will.

So the task is to call AT&T and have the charges removed.

However, first you have to get through their robot menu. And half of its purpose is to prevent anyone from doing anything constructive other than getting out the credit card and paying AT&T for something.

Your host found the best way to get through the voice recognition robot is to shout nonsense at it. It then tells you it doesn't understand. And if you are persistent in this, it will eventually connect you with a human.

So DD complained about the charges and asked where they had come from and where they went to -- as the bill contains no information other than the line charge.

AT&T will not tell you this. If you press a human flunky, they may say to take it up with the long distance provider. A normal person would be suspicious that this is a lie.

Nevertheless, the service representative removed the charges.

The next bill contained no three-way call charges. But for the next, three-way robbery at $1.99 for one call, was back.

DD again shouted his way through the AT&T service robot to a human. The human took the charge off and again maintained AT&T had no idea who might be attaching the rogue items. It was suggested that perhaps I had accidentally hit a key on the handset and made a three-way call without knowing it.

DD scoffed. Decades of using a telephone, and only in the last three months, I've developed involuntary tics in my fingers -- and the jerking fingers accidentally make three-way calls.

All right, now the reader has sussed the service humans have no idea what is going on, or if they do, they are contractually bound from discussing it lest they jeopardize their loser jobs. And that could be bad.

One also suspects that since the three-way charges are small and regular, they might escape notice on many -- perhaps thousands -- of telephone bills. So if they escape notice and are paid, they constitute a pretty big revenue stream.

So it is not unreasonable to be suspicious that AT&T, or a third party in cahoots with AT&T, is behind them.

In fact, David Lazarus, a business writer for the Los Angeles Times has suggested as much in a recent column on bogus fees added to telephone bills.

Another annoying facet of living in a country that is as dysfuntional as the United States is that the person being robbed has no one to complain to other than the entity doing the stealing.

Realistically, the chances that a newspaper, or a legislator, or a government official in charge of regulating a utility that is robbing you, will take action and stop it are virtually nil. One easily imagines that the business opportunity presented by attaching thousands and thousands of small charges -- or thefts -- to telephone bills was too tempting to pass up in light of the way things work in the US.

What's the downside? Well, there would appear to be almost none in terms of potential criminal and legal exposure.

"In fact, the honor system typically prevails among phone companies, third-party vendors and the billing services that act as middlemen in processing transactions," wrote Lazarus.

Ha-ha. The honor system. In America in 2009. Quaint.

"[A] PUC insider said regulators believe the companies receive a portion of the amount billed by third parties and thus have an incentive to include such charges on their bills," reported Lazarus in the same piece.