A file is to be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions on a sophisticated fraud using premium phone lines that has cost Telecom Eireann more than £100,000.
Six men and two women were arrested yesterday morning and 14 premises searched in Dublin during an operation by 38 officers from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation.
Telecom Eireann paid the money into the bank accounts of a bogus company running a premium £1.50-a-minute telephone line. Under the scheme the company was paid more than 60 per cent of the cost, or 94.8p a minute, with Telecom making 26p a minute and the independent regulator getting the balance.
Telecom reimburses the company the payment of 94.8p a minute. However, in this case the only people ringing the line were calling from public phone kiosks, using cloned telephone callcards.
A single computer in an office in Dublin's northside was used to receive the calls from three phone lines. With all three lines operating constantly the company would be reimbursed at a rate of £2.84 a minute, or more than £170 an hour.
A Telecom spokeswoman said the "normal monitoring systems" had alerted management to the operation. "There were longer duration calls from certain pay phones to this particular number," the spokeswoman said. She said amounts totalling more than £100,000 had been paid to the company before alarm bells rang.
Two men set up the company a number of months ago, according to a senior Garda source, and bank accounts were opened in the company name, to receive cheques from Telecom. The money was withdrawn from the accounts as soon as it was lodged.
A recorded message on the line, which purported to offer assistance with computer problems, would request personal identification numbers from callers. Anyone not involved in the operation could not use the line, and the number was not advertised.
It is believed callers would then listen to a silent telephone line, clocking up times of up to 40 minutes, and pretending to be talking to someone if other people were waiting to use the public phone.
Each 100-unit cloned cards would last six minutes, and could be recharged. According to gardai, it would take "a fair amount of expertise" to manufacture and recharge the cards.
It is understood that the arrest of one of the six men took place at the bank where he was withdrawing money from the bogus company bank account.
