While denying a report in Focus magazine that over 60 people have already been arrested in connection with the German billing fraud to generate revenue for telephone sex services, We have at least a dozen suspects and there are more every day, Jrgen Frhlich, director of the investigation at the public prosecutor’s office in Cologne, told Reuters. He said there was no evidence yet that Telekom customers were affected but added it is the subject of investigation. Focus magazine revives the figure of over $300m allegedly lost by Deutsche Bundespost Telekom, a figure that was dismissed as ludicrous by the phone company when the International Herald Tribune published it last week. Two firms allegedly served as front companies, acting as service providers for the phone-sex agencies and then using computers to autodial the services and run up huge bills on phone numbers owned by third parties. The volume of calls to sex lines in Hong Kong, Sao Tome, Guyana and the Dominican Republic totalled $310m, around 80% of which was generated by spurious calls made on computers by the two firms, the magazine claimed. More than 1m Telekom customers have claimed to have been wrongly billed in the past two and a half years. The scandal casts a pall over the planned flotation of Deutsche Telekom, made worse by the unexpected resigation of chairman Helmut Ricke: his personal reasons for not completing his term are now almost universally believed to be frustration with political interference, in particular that the supervisory board to take over when the company becomes Deutsche Telecom AG on January 1 is packed with politicians and includes the Number Two in the postal ministry, which is to be the main telecommunications regulator.
