By Chris Walters  consumerist.com  Photo: ernop

The next time you're disputing a 900 number call to a sex hotline and the CSR tells you nobody else could have made that call, remind them of this story. Over the past 10 months, a Verizon technician made 5,000 calls to sex chat hotlines, totaling 45,000 minutes of dirty talk at a cost of $220,000. He placed the calls from over 950 tapped residential and commercial accounts throughout Bergen county in New Jersey. He has since resigned, and been charged with theft by deception and theft of services.

Joseph R. Vaccarelli worked for Verion for 10 years but only started making the calls within the last 10 months, which makes us wonder what exactly happened last November or December to make him launch his non-stop telephone orgy of fraud—and how he got any work done during that time.

Verizon would like everyone to know that not all of its employees regularly call phone sex hotlines and charge the fees to customer accounts:

"We believe this was a highly isolated incident by an errant individual," Young said. "It should not reflect on the overwhelming majority of our workforce, who bring pride and respect to their jobs every day."

 

"Verizon Worker Charged in 5,000 Illicit Sex Calls" [redOrbit] (Thanks to skokieguy!)