Posted on 01/20/2005 6:48:11 PM PST by wagglebee
The first time the woman called Veronica Davis’ Richmond home, she paid it no mind.
The woman on the phone asked to talk to “Ray,” Davis said. “I just told her she had the wrong number.”
But the woman called back. And called back again. “By the third time, I said, 'Honey, who are you looking for?’” Davis recalled.
She began to wonder if the woman wanted her 12-year-old son, who sometimes called himself “Ray.” When the woman called a fourth time, Davis asked her age. The woman said she was 25. Davis told her that her son was only 12. “Stop calling here!” Davis told her, and hung up.
But the calls were just beginning. Davis soon discovered that her son had met a woman on the Internet and got her phone number. But he didn’t know the number she gave was a $5-per-minute phone-sex line.
Davis’ ensuing struggle with the astronomical phone bills have led her to the General Assembly, which will consider a bill this session to keep “pay-per-call” businesses away from juveniles.
Davis, frustrated and enraged, wrote a letter explaining her plight to several senators, including Sen. Jay O’Brien, R-Clifton. Davis told legislators that the woman called her son for 2½ years – even after the family moved to Hampton – and told him she was his girlfriend.
“Ray” kept calling her back, running up phone bills of more than $2,400.
Police said there was nothing in Virginia law that allowed them to stop her.
Davis’ situation touched him, O’Brien said. “I’ve got five kids, and I would go ballistic” if that happened to his family, he said.
O’Brien introduced a bill this session that, at the request of the phone number’s owner, would require such “pay-per-call” businesses that provide material harmful to juveniles to stop accepting calls from a particular number, charging for those calls or calling that number. “I think phone companies are interested,” O’Brien said. “They don’t want to be used this way.”
Verizon has no objection to the bill, said company spokesman Harry Mitchell, but would like to see it made “crystal- clear” that it’s the pay-per-call line, not the phone carrier, that’s responsible for making sure the unwanted calls stop.
Verizon does offer its customers free blocking of outgoing calls to 900- and 976- numbers, Mitchell said, as well as other call-filtering options. For $5 per month, it provides a “Call Gate” feature that allows customers to further restrict outgoing calls.
Trouble is, Davis’ son didn’t just call from her phone. When Davis’ grandmother died in December 2002, she found a stack of phone bills totaling $1,600 from calls her son had made from the grandmother’s phone. Davis has paid all of the bills.
She enlisted the help of Hampton police, who lectured her son and told the woman she had to stop calling because her customer was a minor. “She kind of laughed it off and she said 'OK’ and she hung up the phone,” Davis said. The police told Davis the woman hadn’t committed any crime; it would be different, they said, if she met her son in person or gave him pornographic material.
Davis started hiding the phone and got a counselor to talk to the boy. He believed he was being unfairly separated from his girlfriend and had become aggressive and angry, she said.
Davis ended up placing her son in a children’s hospital for more intensive counseling. Even then, she said, the boy used the hospital’s cordless phone to call the woman back.
“When you have somebody that’s doing this, and doing this to your child, it’s horrifying,” Davis said. Davis decided enough was enough.
“She picked the wrong mama to mess with. I said, 'That law’s going to change.’”
O’Brien’s bill is scheduled to go before a Senate committee on Commerce and Labor on Monday, and will then be considered by the Senate and House.
The proposed bill probably wouldn’t have helped Davis’ situation, however; she found out later the woman had been calling from Tennessee. But that doesn’t daunt her.
“Once you conquer one bull, you move on to the next one,” Davis said. She said she intends to take her concerns to the federal level, hoping to get the Federal Communications Commission to amend its regulations as well.
And her son, now almost 15, is doing better. “A nightmare like this,” she said, “certainly does not end overnight.”
I had a 'guy' answer a personal ad I posted on AOL once. I called him to talk and his MOTHER answered the phone. She made me feel like some child molester and I told her 'Excuse me lady but your son is going around telling women he's twenty five and giving out your home number to people he doesn't know. Don't get mad at me. ' That was the last time I had a personal ad online. Oh yeah the boy turned out to be sixteen.
"Davis started hiding the phone and got a counselor to talk to the boy. He believed he was being unfairly separated from his girlfriend and had become aggressive and angry, she said."
This boy has a serious attitude problem.
This is the kind of stuff corporeal punishment exists for.
And just think, you could have made $5 a minute talking dirty to him! :)
LOL yeah hehehe
My sister once called a psychic hotline and ran up a bill of 600 dollars. I called the billing agency and they told me I had to pay and refused any other answer. I called the phone company and asked them to call and verify who made the calls and to double check them against who pays the bill and to remove the charges if they dont match. THey did and I never heard anything from that company again.
Corporal, hell, It'd be Major Pain.
He's moved on to call girls that you actually see when you pay for them.
It isn't illegal to engage in sexual phone conversations with a child?
Waited too long is an understatement. I sense more to this story than what's covered. Where's the father?
How old was your sister?
I actually think allowing the phone companies to become billing agents (bag men) for other companies was a mistake of monumental proportions.
The whole thing should be outlawed, Ive never yet seen any 900 number with anything to add to society other than as an illicit way to scam people.
Just stop it Cold!
I have known too many people who have had bad experiences with personals ads on the internet. A friend of a friend met a woman online who turned out to be a stripper in her late thirties (this guy was not yet 21). The last that I heard, he lives in Las Vegas with the stripper. It could be worse, she could have been an axe murderess.
It should be. It should be the same as selling beer to minors.
Yeah could have been worse. A person has to be careful. I just don't do the online dating thing anymore. All the FReeper women trying to marry me off doesn't count ;o)
I'm thinking of forwarding them to my Congressional Representative to see how HE likes them! Maybe something would get done.
16
The father is probably in prison or nonexistent.
16? And she didn't know better?
That's what we need, a match-making service for Freepers. It needs a catchy name; something witty and pithy.
How many FR ladies are trying to get you hitched? Is it some sort of multi-pronged team effort?
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