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Published on July 4, 2007

Following a police raid on a sex-line company and the arrest of a number of female students working for illegal telephone sex services via the 1900 audio-text line, TOT yesterday revoked a concession granted to Thai Televoice and fined it Bt3 million for breaching the contract.

Nathee Sukolrat, acting chairman of the TOT board, told a press conference yesterday that TOT would also file lawsuits against the firm for compensation and check if any TOT officials were involved in the wrongdoing.

The cancellation was because this service became a social problem and TOT acted for society's benefit, he said.

TOT also requested that another 13 companies running chat services on the 1900 line be replaced with other services by July 31, he said. However, those who believed their services were useful to society and wished to remain could appeal to TOT on a case-by-case basis. TOT would, in the next few days, hold a meeting with the 13 companies to formulate guidelines, he added.

Nathee insisted that chat services were not the most profitable of the many services provided at the 1900 line. He said the most profitable were horoscope services - for instance, the Mor Lak Fun Thong programme earned the fortune-teller up to Bt400,000 a month.

He added that the 1900 line services yielded Bt120 million last year and this amount was split so that the operators earned 60 per cent and TOT took 40 per cent. The Bt120 million was just 0.16 per cent of TOT's total income last year.

Meanwhile, Ekkalak Lumchomkhae, a senior official of the Mirror Foundation, welcomed the contract cancellation but said the foundation would closely watch TOT to see if it implemented its decision and made changes.

Ekkalak said the foundation had been monitoring this issue since last year when a girl went missing after chatting on the 1900 line. Statistics from 2004 to 2006 showed 10 out of 200 girls reported missing had disappeared after chatting on the 1900 line.

The foundation had tried to contact the chat-line companies about the missing children with no result, so it passed the issue on to related agencies and last July requested that TOT revoke concessions granted to chat-line companies. TOT had not responded until this contract cancellation.

An informed source said the sex-line services were advertised via entertainment magazines, sport newspapers, websites and television.

The sex-line companies arranged for female operators aged between 18 and 25 to take calls in three shifts a day. Each shift had 15 operators, but this number could increase to 30 during peak periods.

Each operator - earning an average of Bt250 to Bt300 a day - had to talk with customers for at least 200 minutes per day and if she reached 300 minutes, she would get a bonus. The service charged Bt13 a minute while other audio-text services normally charged from Bt6 per minute.

Mayuree  Sukyingcharoenwong

The Nation