A black-market telephone service devised by a Lucasville inmate was one of the most elaborate schemes ever uncovered in an Ohio prison, state corrections officials said.
The prisoner managed to bypass the controls on the automated inmate telephone system at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility and obtain 23 phone lines which he rented to other inmates, investigators said.
The inmate, Lonny Bristow, 27, from Mansfield, pleaded guilty to theft charges in Scioto County Common Pleas Court in Portsmouth recently. Judge Walter Lytten added three years and three months to the 10-year sentence Bristow is serving for retaliation, aiding an escape, harassment by an inmate and telephone harassment.
State investigator David See said Bristow set up the scheme by fraudulently obtaining a credit card in the name of a suburban Columbus man.
Bristow had seen the name of Praveen Arcot of Dublin in a newspaper announcement of his hiring as a software engineer by a Columbus company.
Arcot said Bristow began using his name in late September, and a credit-card company caught up with the deception in January.
“They acted very fast,” Arcot told The Columbus Dispatch. “I was not charged anything, but the damage has been done to my credit history.”
Prison officials began investigating Bristow in December 1999, after he'd lost his telephone privileges for making threats and throwing something at a prison officer.
To bypass phone-system controls, Bristow would call the service lines at Atlantic Bell and Pacific Bell telephone companies, See said.  Operators accepted collect calls from the automated system, thinking that Bristow was having trouble placing calls.
Once connected, Bristow would ask to be transferred to other departments, which were unaware that he was a prisoner making a collect call.
Prison officials identified $14,748.95 in charges billed to Arcot's credit cards, telephone companies and third parties.
Bristow used Arcot's name to establish four telephone lines, which he eventually split into 23 additional numbers by using the telephone companies' custom-ring feature.
“He began selling the phone numbers to other inmates for a week or two at a time,” See said. “Once the time he had sold the numbers for was up, he would call the phone company back and have the numbers changed.”
See said he is not sure how many inmates took advantage of Bristow's setup.