SEX INDUSTRY KEEPS FTC JUMPING

According to a report in Wired.com, after complaints poured in last month from porn surfers who had inadvertently downloaded software that reset their modems to dial the African nation of Chad, the FTC asked AT&T to shut down access to those telephone numbers.

"The FTC asked us to block access to specific numbers to Chad and we complied," said AT&T spokeswoman Lee Ann Kuster.

She confirmed that the numbers were those used by the adult companies that created the so-called "sex dialers."

Not be outdone, the No Credit Card Network, which operates at least some of these dialers and sells them to adult websites, promptly picked another location to route its calls.

This time it''s Niue, a small island in the South Pacific with a population of just over 2,000 that gained its independence from New Zealand in 1974.

Experts say when access to Niue gets shut down, the dialers will find somewhere else.

"I really question whether the FTC can keep pace with this," said Frederick Lane, author of Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Cyber Age. "There are a large number of financially strapped countries, any number of which are willing to compete for this business."

Lane said the company that makes and sells the dialers, in this case Dublin-based Nocreditcard.com, gets a good chunk of the profits. The site that provides the dialers as part of the "free" movies users can download get a percentage of the call, as does the network that carries the call. Finally, the receiving country gets what''s called the "settlement charge," anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of the call.

Unless the FTC asks AT&T to start blocking telephone access to Niue, customers who end up with the charges on their bills are unlikely to have much recourse.

They can try going after the site where they downloaded the dialer in the first place, but that''s only if they can figure out who''s responsible for the site.

At AdultBuffet.com, for example, a user can readily download a movie and the software dialer. Users are warned in small print that the call will be charged at rates of up to $7.31 per minute, and will have a tough time convincing the folks at Adultbuffet to refund.

The user might trace the IP address back to a service provider, which is likely to drop the site like a hot potato as soon as it hears about the dialer.

When ISPs learned about the dialers that called Chad last month, they took turns dropping Adultbuffet.com in a hurry.

Lynn Macias, a spokeswoman for ISP Nonstopnet, said when the company learned of its affiliation with Adultbuffet, it was dropped immediately.

"I think that''s unbelievable that they were running that," she said at the time. "We had no idea they were running that little scam, that''s not within our business model."

In fact, minutes later the site was picked up by Hitter Communications, an ISP in Hernando, Florida. A company spokesman there said someone had registered the site to them by mistake, and promised to release the site immediately.

That was three weeks ago. So far Hitter still hasn''t gotten around to taking down the site. As of Tuesday, the IP address in question was still registered to Hitter Communications.

Hitter Communications is owned by John Henry Williams, the son of Boston Red Sox legend Ted Williams. The company appears to be closely associated with StrictlyHosting.com, a company that hosts dozens of adult sites. Calls to a Hitter Communications employee were routed to a voicemail for StrictlyHosting.

In the end, Lane said it''s almost pointless to try and pin down the folks behind the dialer.

"They come and they go like fireflies in the night," he said. "It can be very difficult to track these folks down.... The far more-effective solution is consumer education."

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