A telephone fraud operation was discovered in Nuku'alofa in February 2004 after it had been running illegal international communications for two years, allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands of pa'anga worth of calls from both TCC and Tonfön's systems.

Alfred Soakai, the Senior Communications Counsel for the Department of Communication, said that the company, whose name cannot be released pending court action, was registered and set up in Tonga in 2002.

A complaint was made by the Tonga Communications Corporation (TCC) whose staff became suspicious when they received a satellite call showing a local code instead of an international one.

Alfred said that the illegal operators rented an office at the Fakafanua Center in Ma...ufanga, Nuku'alofa, and installed a switchboard, a transmitter and a satellite disc. The satellite disc directly linked them to various international telephone providers.

Normally, when an overseas call is made to Tonga the connected route is through a main switchboard that puts the calls through to either a TCC or a Tonfön network. However, the illegal operators set up their own switchboard so that when overseas calls were made to Tonga their satellite disc picked them up, and through their switchboard they were allegedly stealing those calls and rerouting them to their own network. In order for those calls to be received in Tonga they leased over 10 phone lines from TCC and Tonfön to do the job.

Alfred said that it is estimated that both Tonfön and TCC lost about $200,000 pa...anga of business from this illegal operation.

He said that the operation was automated, and once a month someone came from Fiji to check on the equipment, although there was a girl employed at the office answering the telephone. The people behind the company, believed to be of Fijian, American and Canadian nationals, had fled the island. The Department of Communication had not been able to contact the people through their email address and phone number contacts in California, the United States and Canada.

The authorities meanwhile, have confiscated equipment valued at $100,000 from the office, and Alfred said that they had started legal proceedings in the Supreme Court of Tonga. The company was given a year to respond to the allegations.