North Country Gazette



Correctional Billing & NCO—Need For Federal Probe

Posted on Tuesday, 31 of July , 2007 at 10:12 pm

SPECIAL REPORT

It arrived on a Saturday morning, looking suspiciously like advertising, with a CBS imprint in the left hand corner of the envelope.

But it wasn’t from the media mogul—it was the one-two scam and abusive practices of Correctional Billing Services and their counterpart, NCO Financial Services, both of Pennsylvania.

Correctional Billing Services is a division of Evercom Systems of Selma, Ala., which seems to have a monopoly on inmate calls throughout the United States and appears to be charging the highest rates in the country, tweaking antitrust laws as well as consumer protection and credit laws. http://www.northcountrygazette.org/articles/2007/012307PhoneExtortion.html

Perhaps the biggest con artist isn’t behind bars, it’s Correctional Billing Service and NCO, their collection agency, that controls whether or not that inmate can communicate with his friends and family at costs that stagger the imagination and worse, can impact your credit rating and report  with false charges and abuse practices.

Evercom in essence forces you to give your personal information over the phone and forces you to do business with them, whether you want to or not. If you thought the choice of your telephone service provider and long distance carrier was up to you, think again. The family member of one inmate summed it up succinctly. “I really feel like Correctional Billing is taking advantage,” she says angrily. “I don’t like giving out my personal information over the telephone. I’ve paid my bill, and now it’s between my phone company and Correctional Billing Services. It really bothers me that Evercom can block my line at their whim, even though my bill is paid and has never been in arrears. My son is in what sounds like a horrible place, and I want to hear on a regular basis that everything is OK. There’s no reason I should be hounded by this corporation in order to do that.”

The owners of Evercom should be the ones behind the bars, jailed for grand theft, extortion,  coercion, harassment and abusive debt collection services—especially when you don’t owe them anything.

According to the blurb on their website, Correctional Billing Services is the only nationwide provider to offer “customer care and account activation centers solely dedicated to the friends and family members of inmates”…….and their wallets. If you’ve got the money—-up front—you can talk but talk’s not cheap. The going rate is $17.30 for 15 minutes, no matter the location.

Correctional Billing Services is close to a monopoly, stating that it represents over 3,100 correctional facilities nationwide and as one snotty representative stated, they decide who you can talk with and when. “You’re not talking to anyone”, one young female challenged. “We own the phones and we set the rates and we can put a block on your calls whenever we want”.

Their NCO affiliates have about the same friendly manner. Evercom, formed in 1996, installs and maintains its equipment at no cost to facilities, and then pays generous kickbacks for the right to extort the families and friends of the inmates.

Correctional Building Services sets arbitrary thresholds, deciding how many collect calls you can receive in a 90 day period and once you reach that limit, you’re cut off, regardless of if your bill is paid. Their “representatives” refuse to allow users to speak with supervisors, refuse to identify the criteria used to set their “limits”. Call your phone company and they’ll tell you there’s nothing they can do.

If you have a sister or brother, girlfriend, boyfriend, some other relative or friend who is incarcerated somewhere in the U.S., no doubt you’ve dealt with CBS and no doubt your experience is far from pleasurable. www.correctionalbillingservices.com

A federal investigation into this organization is long overdue, not just because of its rates and practices which seem to be suspiciously close to antitrust violations, but the abusive and fraudulent debt collection practices being engaged in by their collector, NCO Financial Services.

In the case of the North Country Gazette, late last year and into 2007, in connection with covering the Elsebeth Baumgartner story of Ohio, collect calls were accepted from the correctional facilities in which she was incarcerated.

Evercom aka CBS is in dire need of a federal investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov) as they are engaging in a virtual extortion and blackmail of an inmate’s family and friends, charging $17.34 for a 15 minute phone call and arbitrarily setting a threshold of $130.

Once they claim that you have reached your threshold, although Correctional Building Services refuses to tell you their criteria for setting that amount, you’re blocked and can’t receive any phone calls from an inmate for the next 90 days. Correctional Billing Services decides for you if you can accept collect phone calls on your phone bill, who you can talk to and for how long, interfering in your business relationship with your telephone service provider.

But wait—there’s their blackmail—buy a prepaid calling card from them—in increments of $50 with an $8 service fee—charged to your credit card, you might be able to get another call or two—as long as you keep renewing that card.

Think about it, how’d you like to go 90 days without being able to talk to your loved ones. Just because you made a mistake and are incarcerated doesn’t mean that the government and Evercom should rape you and your family by imposing outrageous costs. Evercom doesn’t reach out and touch you, they slam you in the ground and stomp all over you.

In the case of NCG, after the $130 limit was reached and CBS would allow no more collect calls to be billed the private phone account, the only other option was to spend the $58 which allowed you two phone calls at $17.34 each and some change left over.   At the time that Baumgartner was released, there was still time left on the last prepaid card. Everything had been paid in full to date.  If you hadn’t prepaid, no collect calls would have been allowed to your number as Evercom would have imposed a block.

But on the weekend of July 15, there arrived in the mail a dunning letter from CBS with no phone number, no account information, no nothing—just a line that the “previous balance” was $34.45 and that it had to be paid by July 30. 

Undoubtedly they collect a lot of money that way, many people will simply pay the money rather than spend the time arguing to get the unjust charge erased and to protect their credit rating.

And no doubt NCO and Correctional Billing count on that.

Previous balance?  It was the first and only time that any billing had ever arrived from CBS and there should have been no billing—collect calls were billed through the private phone company up to the $130 limit and thereafter, everything else was prepaid.  The only amount that could conceivably be owed would be to Frontier, the telephone provider, with absolutely no connection to Evercom.

Attempts to contact Correctional Billing Services to dispute the bill went unanswered by them.

And then on July 26—5 days before their self-imposed cutoff date— the harassing, abusive collection calls started from NCO Financial Services of Horsham, PA.  Correctional Billing Services uses a billing address of a post office box number in Mechanicsburg, PA.

There is no discussion with NCO—in their minds, you owe the money because they said so.  How do you want to pay your pound of flesh?  http://www.ncogroup.com/

“Resolving deficient customer relationships and collecting past due obligations, NCO F&A focuses on customer retention while reducing delinquencies and improving recoveries”, their website states.  You’re deficient because they said so.  Period.  There is no room to dispute the bill. Attempts to resolve the matter by their website contact form is fruitless. http://www.ncogroup.com/contact/debtor

The North Country Gazette is undertaking a special investigation into Correctional Billing Services and NCO Financial Services and invites persons who have had similar experiences to contact NCG with a brief description, name and contact information.  NCG will assimilate the complaints and send them collectively to the Federal Trade Commission and the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, seeking an investigation of the two companies.  Information can be emailed to news@northcountrygazette.org before Aug. 30.

The typical modus operandi for Correctional Billing Services after they refuse to allow any additional collect calls to be billed to your home phone is then to inundate you with harassing phone calls, much the same as NCO Financial Services does with their abusive debt collection practices, beginning their calls even before the cutoff date on your unitemized bill of “previous balance”. “This is Correctional Billing Services. Please press 5 to receive an important message”, the recording blared in my ear as I answered the insistent ringing phone, the fourth such call within six hours.

“Your calls from correctional facilities served by Evercom have been blocked”, you’ll be told.

Not surprising. Such is routine for Evercom, the system used by the Ottawa County Jail in Ohio for collect inmate telephone calls and at dozens of other facilities across the country.

Talk is not cheap.

Evercom, Correctional Billing Services, their practices and rates, are cause for frequent anger on prison blogs and message boards and NCO isn’t far behind.

The jails and prisons contracting with Evercom get a generous kickback from the phone company and as many note, some of the costs are beyond exorbitant and border on grand theft.

Complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, to the Public Service Commission and to prisoners’ rights groups are needed to effect the necessary and overdue changes and to reduce the costs of the collect calls.

“I am very angry as well… at a certain “quarantine” facility in Jackson, Michigan, the inmate calls are currently $17.34 per 15 minute call!”, the poster on one message board says. “Quarantine facilities are the first point of entry into the prison system and they are usually filled with young, first time offenders that have never been through the system before. These individuals really need to call home to hear a loved one’s voice! They “need” a support system! Many families of inmates are NOT rich! They cannot afford such rates! Correctional Billing Services and other like companies are making a killing off of loved ones of inmates! This is simply unacceptable and something has GOT to be done! I am amazed, shocked, STUNNED that these kind of charges were ever allowed! UNBELIEVABLE!!! “Sick” is really the word for it!”.

Another poster writes, “My boyfriend is incarcerated and he would call me regularly. My phone bill was always too high. We are in different states…each call to accept is $4.84, then .84 each additional minute…Well, to make the story short, I requested prepaid $50 a week. Every week I would send a check by phone for $50. Now my phone is blocked and when I call the representative from Correctional Billing Services, they never set up my account and that I have to pay a $735.55 bill before my phone can get unblocked. Meanwhile, I paid already close to $1,400 in four months for calls that get disconnected after just one or two minutes.

I’ve been trying to get this solved for the past two weeks and no one can help me… They said my total balance since day one is $1,300,meaning I should have credit… Now I’m afraid not to pay cause I don’t wanna hurt my credit but I don’t think I should pay either. Help”.

To read more comments about the protested policies and costs of Evercom, see http://forums.treemedia.com/fb/showthread.php?t=713 and http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff140152.htm

New York State got a reprieve from the high costs of collect calls from inmates after the Center for Constitutional Rights took the issue all the way to the state’s highest court. On the eve of a scheduled argument before the Court of Appeals, to stop state government and MCI from charging exorbitant phone rates to families and friends of prisoners, Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced that the state would voluntarily reduce rates.New York was one of the cheaper rates, forcing recipients to pay $3 per call and 16 cents a minute for a total of $8.40 for 15 minutes as compared to Evercom’s $17.34, more than double New York’s rate.

The court has yet to decide the legality of the previous administration’s policy relating to the telephone costs in Walton v. New York State Department of Correctional Services.  That lawsuit was brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The new rates took effect April 1, will charge only the cost of the call, allowing families to maintain contact with their loved ones and friends without the undue financial burden.

Something has to be done to force Correctional Billing Services and Evercom to reduce its rates and to stop its price gouging, penalizing mothers and fathers, girlfriends and boyfriends, sisters and brothers and friends who have done nothing wrong but yet they are being charged outrageous rates, being penalized for having someone they love in jail.

And even when they pay the extortion, then they are submitted to false claims and abusive tactics to pay money that isn’t owed. To complain about rates for intrastate (within a state) collect calls from public phones in prisons, contact the state public utility commission in the state where the call originated and terminated. State public utility commission addresses may be found at http://naruc.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=15 or in the blue pages or government section of your local telephone directory. To complain about interstate and international rates, file a complaint with the FCC. http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/Inmate.html

The Public Utility Law Project is also addressing the situation and information about inmate phone calls and what to do can be found at their website at http://www.pulp.tc/html/inmate_phones.html

To contact the Center for Constitutional Rights, email info@ccr-ny.org; Correctional Billing Services, customer_service@correctionalbillingservices.com and cdarveau@securustech.net ; the FCC at fccinfo@fcc.gov ; Pennsylvania Consumer Protection, consumer@paoca.org and the Federal Trade Commission at www.ftc.gov  Pennsylvania Attorney General,  http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/ and Pennsylvania Office of Consumer Advocate http://www.oca.state.pa.us/Default_IE.htm   7-31-07

 

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