Nicolaos Kantartzis, a 62-year old electrical engineer, has pleaded guilty to an ingenious crime.
Kantartzis owns approximately 160 pay-phones in Washington, D.C. and Maryland. As cell-phones rose in popularity, his profits declined and his business was losing money quickly. What to do?
Starting in January 2005, he used a computer at his home in Bethesda to program the pay-phones he owned to place calls to toll-free numbers for government agencies, companies including Dell and multiple airlines.
What did this net Kantartzis? While the robo-dialing operation was underway, he collected 50 cents for each toll-free call that connected. Federal prosecutors allege Kantartzis collected up to four million dollars from his robotic toll-free dialing project.
How did he get caught? Things were going well for Kantartzis until an employee at the government’s General Services Administration noticed an irregular pattern of incoming calls on the agency’s toll free line and an investigation was launched, according to GSA spokeswoman Sarah Breen.
“By auto-dialing, this fraudster exploited a public service and essentially, ‘dialed for taxpayer dollars,'” GSA Inspector General Brian Miller said in a statement.
Kantartzis’s scheme isn’t unique, however. Two Wisconsin men were charged in April with a similar operation. Prosecutors say they fraudulently obtained more than $1 million over three years.
