Cuba is one of the most expensive countries to call from the U.S. It’s partly because of the embargo’s legacy—which makes directly connecting the U.S. and Cuba phone lines difficult—and partly because of Cuba’s limited and outdated telecommunications infrastructure. It costs almost a dollar a minute to call Cuba from the U.S…..
To get around this tightly restricted market, a great many fraudulent and ingenious ways of making money have sprung up around calling to Cuba. Global capitalism abhors a vacuum. And so, of calls from North America and Europe, the ones to Cuba are the most likely to be fraudulent in some way, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association’s 2015 global survey. And telecommunications fraud is no small thing. In all, fraud costs the telecommunications industry an estimated $38.1 billion a year.
Ironically, the people actually making money off this fraud may not even be in Cuba. Here’s how the fraud in my War of the Worlds / Animal Farm case probably worked, according to industry fraud investigators I spoke to. I was calling with VoIP, or voice over IP, meaning my phone call was routed through the internet infrastructure rather than through traditional phone lines. VoIP is cheaper because it automatically searches for the cheapest route from point A (in my case, Washington, D.C.) to point B (Havana, Cuba). Like cheap airfare that requires many layovers, the cheapest way to connect with Havana can pass through many countries. It might go across the Atlantic to Europe and back. It might make half a dozen or more hops through different carriers.
Somewhere along the way, I encountered a less than scrupulous carrier. Big telecom companies are carriers, but dozens of smaller ones all over the world sometimes offer cheaper rates through certain countries. It turned out that the Cuban number I called was indeed invalid—it came from an outdated webpage, I’ve since found—and some carrier was diverting or allowing the diversion of calls that went to invalid Cuban numbers to an audiobook some percentage of the time. (That’s why I sometimes got the recording and sometimes the call just ended after an error message. I know this because I’ve now dialed that same number at least 10 times.)
The recordings can be random. “We get everything from fake rings, heavy breathing, adult entertainment, lottery reading, psychic readings, music—so random recordings,” said one veteran industry fraud analyst. The goal is just to get people to stay on the phone as long as possible. Calling Cuba and getting an audiobook of Animal Farm (the free public domain version) was probably just a weirdly resonant coincidence.
My phone call never actually made it to Cuba. The fraudsters make money because the last carrier simply pretends that it connected to Cuba when it actually connected me to the audiobook recording. So it charges Cuban rates to the previous carrier, which charges the preceding carrier, which charges the preceding carrier, and the costs flow upstream to my telecom carrier. The fraudsters siphoning money from the telecommunications system could be anywhere in the world.
MORE: I Dialed a Wrong Number and Stumbled Into International Phone Fraud – The Atlantic