“Berkeley residents Daniel David and and Scott D. Nisbett were sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for their roles in a pay phone scam.
“The two leased 24 pay phone lines, of which 23 were routed to an office space in South San Francisco where an automatic phone dialer was rigged to make endless calls to toll-free 800 numbers.”

This scam is not surprising. Payphone owners get a cut from calls placed to toll-free numbers from their phones. These guys might have gotten away with this forever, but they got greedy.