FCC cracks down on ‘stammers’ WASHINGTON (AP) - The number of victims of illegal “slam ming” - the unauthorized changing of a customer’s long-distance com pany - has exploded over the past five years, showing that federal reg ulations prohibiting it are all but meaningless, officials said Thursday. Complaints to the Federal Communications Commission rose from 1,867 in 1993 to more than 20,000 last year. And since most people don’t bother to report inci dents of slamming, the problem probably is far worse, Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said during a hearing of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Victims often end up paying higher, sometimes exorbitant, rates for poorer service provided by unethical telephone companies, said a report released Thursday by the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm. “Deliberate slamming is like stealing and should not be tolerat ed,” said Collins, subcommittee chairwoman and sponsor of a bill that would make intentional, repeat ed slamming a criminal offense. “It’s time to quarantine this con sumer epidemic,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., another sponsor. Meantime, FCC Chairman Bill Kennard, called upon the nation’s local phone companies - the main providers of billing and collection for consumers - to help the commis sion combat another growing prob lem: cramming. That is the practice of billing customers for services they never ordered, such as call wait ing, voice mail and Internet access. in letters 1 nursday, Kennard asked the companies to “work with the commission in order to adopt an industry code of practice to prevent cramming.” The code, he said, should include getting written approval from customers to bill them for nontelecommunications services and putting nontelecommu nications charges on a separate page from the rest of the telephone bill. The FCC is scheduled to adopt tougher anti-slamming rules in a few weeks, and the Senate is expect ed to debate legislation later this spring. For now, the most effective actions consumers can take is hav a Its time to quarantine this ... epidemic ” Dick Durbin Illinois senator ing their long-distance companies “freeze” their accounts, said Eljay Bowron, the GAO’s assistant comp troller general for special investiga tions, told the subcommittee. “The FCC has adopted some anti-slamming measures, but effec tively does little to protect con sumers,” he said. “Most states have some anti-slamming measures, but their extent varies widely.” Bowron said slamming is less frequent among big telephone com panies that have their own equip ment and more common among the smaller “switchless resellers,” which lease equipment and tele phone lines from bigger companies. Telephone customers sometimes are slammed inadvertently through clerical errors. But unscrupulous companies build up customers by misleading consumers, staging deceptive sweepstakes and some times going so far as to falsify authorization documents or simply copy telephone numbers out of phone directories, Bowron said. He said Daniel H. Fletcher, whose Fletcher Cos. were fined more than $5 million by the FCC on Tuesday, had billed customers at least $20 million and left industry firms with at least $3.8 million in unpaid bills by 1996 after beginning , large-scale slamming the year before. Federal investigators suspect that Fletcher may still be running similar scams, but they don’t know where he is, Bowron said. Kennard told the panel: “I believe that the reason people slam is because there is a financial incen tive to do so, and we need to remove that financial incentive.” German parliament votes to use euro Backers say adoption of continentwide currency will unify Europe BONN, Germany (AP) - Parliament on Thursday over whelmingly endorsed plans to give up the German mark for the single European currency. Chancellor Helmut Kohl called the vote one of Germany’s “deci sions of the century. “I’m assured that the success story of the German mark will con tinue as a success story for the eurd,” Kohl said. & ^ • > Uiisj ■ The 575-35 vote in parliament’^ lower house was iargelya formality, since the major political parties already had endorsed plans for Germany to be among the 11 European Union nations adopting the euro on Jan. 1. Many speakers steered a day r long debate toward domestic poli tics, including Gerhard Schroeder of the opposition Social Democrats, nominated this month to challenge Kohl in September’s national elec tions. But Kohl largely confined his hourlong speech to European inte gration, saying monetary union was the biggest step in efforts by the 15 EU nations to become more unified. •{ ~ Polls show