Cornell Police warn the campus about a telephone scam

Warning: the person on the other end of the telephone may not be who he says he is, and believing him could be expensive.

Cornell Police are warning the campus community about a telephone scam that recently cost a department quite a bit of money. The illegal hoax goes like this:

Your phone rings and when you answer it, the person on the other end says he is a telephone operator or a technician working on the lines, and he asks you to transfer him to an outside line. You good-naturedly do so and forget about the call.

Meanwhile, the person you transferred to your outside line is making long-distance calls at your expense; his call could be originating from another city or even a prison.

Cornell Police Investigator Michael Musci said that one department on campus was recently charged for an 86-minute call to Yemen that, when traced, originated from a grocery store in New York City. Other recent illegal calls made on campus 800 lines went to Japan, Spain, France and other countries. Some of these calls are impossible to trace because of technology allowing the user to mask the numbers they are calling from.

The 800 numbers on campus are especially desirable from a criminal point of view, Musci said, because the scammer is not even charged for the original call.

Musci asked people on campus, especially those monitoring 800 lines, to be careful not to transfer calls to outside lines. If such a request call comes in, Musci said the recipient should transfer the call to Cornell Police at 255-1111. Anyone who has information about such calls should contact him at 255-8982.