My Dear Friends,

This is not an urban legend. This actually happened to me, Barbara Willens, on Saturday, April 26, 2008.

The phone woke me around 6:00 a.m. and when I answered it there was a recording (however, I didn't realize it was a recording) which said, "This is the AT&T International Operator. I have a collect call for you, please press the star key if you wish to accept." My grandson was in Spain at the time so of course I pressed the star key. A man came on the line and said, "There is a collect call from a relative of yours at Cook County Correctional Facility. If you accept the call, hit the star key." Well, again, my son is a cross country truck driver and I wasn't sure where my daughter was so I pressed the star key. He came back on the line and said, "You will have to talk to my supervisor, and his number is *72__________________. I immediately hit *72 and the number wondering at the time if that was a valid number. It didn't go through so I asked the operator to try. She said there were too many numbers, which I knew.

I immediately called my children and found out they were OK. Then, I said to my self, "My self, you have been scammed," but I didn't know what the scam was. I wasn't able to reach the Verizon fraud department until Monday. A lady asked if I had call forwarding, which I don't. She said *72 starts call forwarding and if I had it my number would have been transferred to the number the man gave me. Then the inmates at Cook County Correctional Facility could have billed all their calls to my number and one of them would have accepted the charges on my behalf. This is a scam that is going on in the correctional facilities throughout the country. My girlfriend checked it out on Snopes.com and it gives a different scenario, with the same *72 ending.