Ed Bosson has done it again. This week he called our attention to fraud committed by VRS agencies. On his blog, Bosson provided copies of publicly available documents from the FBI. I read these documents throughout, and what I read was amazing.

Here are the facts that I pulled from the two PDFs provided by Bosson.

ICSD PDF

The ICSD PDF states that the FCC-OIG has tracked a"dramatic increase"in payouts to VRS providers from the TRS Fund. For example , in January 2005 - $10.8 million representing 1.4 million VRS minutes was paid. By January 2009 that had skyrocketed to.$51.2 million paid representing 8.1 million VRS minutes.

How were so many minutes generated? The huge increase was the result of fraudelently generated minutes. Fraudulent minutes were generated through non-interpreted "run calls" also known as "revenue calls."

A "run call" was a call to a long recording such as a podcast. At one VRS company, most of the calls made were run calls. Video interpreter logins were even used to make run calls.

That's not all. Video relay interpreters told to provide callers with numbers to call if a call ended.

Hawkins PDF

According to the Hawkins PDF, callers from China were making run calls. These callers were allegedly paid to make the calls. Video relay interpreters could even see that some run callers were making multiple VRS run calls at the same time.

Finally, when the legitimate call volume was low, video relay interpreters called themselves to generate minutes.

Guide Comments

I had seen Ed's blog earlier but was not really aware of what this was about until this morning when an interpreter told me that a VRS agency had been visited by the FBI and that 3 or 4 call centers were closing today. Many young and uncertified interpreters lost their jobs.

According to the interpreter, video relay interpreters who saw what was going on became fed up and complained to the FCC which then called in the FBI because the FCC does not have the authority that the FBI does to investigate criminal matters.

I can't help but wonder what can possibly prevent this kind of fraud from happening in the future. It sounds like it may be easy to commit this kind of fraud. What safeguards, if any, can be built into the VRS system? If you had a business whose profit depended on the volume of calls made to your business, wouldn't you have an incentive to keep that volume up even if it meant fraud? Is the answer to drop the per-minute payment and just make a flat payment to VRS service providers?

In my opinion, VRS fraud happens not because of what the per minute rate is, but because these companies' profits depend on the revenue brought in by the number of minutes. How do you remove that incentive? Do you have to nationalize the VRS agencies, turning them into Federally-run agencies instead of Federally-reimbursed agencies?

Ticklerkid on the forum is frustrated by the inaccessibility of podcasts, and wants to know if there is any software that can convert podcast speech to text. One respondent mentioned voicewriting. Is there any other software out there (besides the function in Windows Vista and Dragon software) that can do what Ticklerkid wants?

I should have known. Observing hearing people with their iPods, I couldn't help comparing them to the hearing aid users of yore. Now comes the news that there is an app that can turn an iPhone/iPod Touch into a hearing aid. Several places have reported this. Here are a couple: 1. CNET 2. TechCrunch

In the too cute not to blog category: A deaf woman's cats (Gwinnett Daily Post, July 5, 2009) perform some of the same functions as a hearing dog. Among other things, one of her cats detected termites in her home. I have a cat and all he does is demand to be fed...

Related on About.com:

Cats

Nobody likes to see deaf people lose jobs, particularly teachers. However, in Massachusetts, deaf teachers [update: in this case, a sign language teacher] who can not pass the state's English competency test for teachers are at risk of being let go. This test is required for teacher certification. According to the article in The Eagle-Tribune, so far the teachers have not been let go but it does beg the question, should an uncertified deaf teacher be permitted to continue teaching indefinitely?

Rebecca on the forum describes how she nearly died, and was diagnosed with an autoimmune hearing loss. Her story, which she posted in hopes of helping someone else, is detailed and has some medical terminology. A minor hearing loss was first discovered when she was still in high school, and then...

Related on About.com: Autoimmune Inner Ear Disease

If you were born after 1975, you probably never heard of the first Caption Action. Caption Action was a national grassroots campaign to get closed captions on home video. And it was successful. The deaf and hard of hearing community and its hearing friends can learn lessons from the first Caption Action as it embarks upon a new captioning battle, to get captions on the Internet...Caption Action 2.

Caption Action's primary tactic was a petition drive. Today, that would not be an effective tactic. Much has changed in the over 20 years since the first Caption Action. Today, we must conduct our grassroots activity via the Internet.

The 21st Century Communications & Video Accessibility Act of 2009 has just been introduced in Congress by Representative Ed Markey (D-MA). This is the bill that if passed, would require captioning on the Internet. (Hat tip to Jared Evans). A similar bill (21st Century Communications And Video Accessibility Act For People With Disabilities) failed last year. This year, with internet video growing by leaps and bounds, the deaf and hard of hearing community and its hearing friends are making a real effort to push this one through.

Have you struggled to pay for hearing aids? The Hearing Industries Association is one of the organizations trying to get Congress to pass legislation to require insurance companies to at least partially cover the cost of hearing aids.

Newborn hearing screening is everywhere now -- in the United States and other advanced countries. However, there are countries where newborn hearing screening is not as available, and even in developed nations, a baby can show evidence of or acquire a hearing loss, later in babyhood. There are ways parents can discern whether a baby has a hearing loss that can be verified by an audiologist.