Someone's on The Line

Telephone companies struggle to disconnect wily thieves who rip off cellular customers

The remarkable thing about the customers who filed in and out of Allman's Fashion Discount, a small Miami apparel shop, was that they never bought any clothes. Instead, say the police, they flocked to 17 cellular phones at the back of the store to call family and friends in Central and South America for just 50 cents a minute -- less than half the nighttime rate for standard phones. Even at that low price the shop's owners, who had rigged their phones to bill the calls to other people's numbers, managed to rake in up to $200,000 in just six months...

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