
Ask HN: What was this mid-90s phone scam? - ashamedspammer
Back in 1996 -- when I was a reckless, shameless, selfish, stupid and arrogant teenager -- over the course of a summer I got involved in banner ads for porn sites and then spamming for porn sites and finally spamming for a phone sex hotline.<p>This last one was incredibly profitable, and, I came to believe, a scam which was likely incredibly damaging to its victims, and I regret playing a role. And I&#x27;ve always been curious exactly what was going on with it.<p>The way it worked was you would sign up with this company online and they would assign you a unique phone number into their hotline. And you&#x27;d get paid dollars per minute for calls made to that number, for which they would mail you a check every two weeks.<p>As far as I could tell, the number had the US country code but was located in the Caribbean and subject to hefty long distance fees. I called the number myself once and sat on hold a while, but was never put through to an operator and never asked for a credit card.<p>I came to believe that the company never directly collected any money from callers and perhaps did not even have any operators to answer the call, but instead received kickbacks for generating life-destroying phone bills. Has anyone heard of anything like this and can bring clarity to what the situation was?
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issa
The company definitely collected money for the calls. It was the equivalent of
a 976 number in the US, that bills by the fraction of a minute. The long
distance charges would have gone to the phone company, but I'm fairly certain
the company would keep the bulk of the bill. I don't have any insider info,
but this was a common scam back in those days.
[https://www.newbedfordguide.com/caribbean-phone-
scam/2014/01...](https://www.newbedfordguide.com/caribbean-phone-
scam/2014/01/10)

