Phone company employees were creating fake accounts so that foreigners could run up high toll charges and then stick unsuspecting citizens with the bill, agents said Tuesday.

Agents detained an employee of the San Pedro agency of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad Tuesday and conducted six raids including one at the branch telephone office.

A second man facing allegations stemming from the same scam already is in custody, agents said. They said the loss to the phone company may be as much as 8 million colons, some $15,000 or $16,000.

Agents for the Judicial Investigating Organization said the operation worked this way:

A phone company employee used fake documents to create an account for a cellular telephone. The employee gathered facturas and utility bills that are required for establishing a cell phone account, and in some cases the employees even paid the 12,500-colon security deposit.

Once the account was established in the name of an innocent third party, the cell telephone was marketed to foreigners, mainly from Colombia, Panamá and the Dominican Republic. The foreigners would use the telephone until it was cut off by the company for non-payment.

The innocent third parties only became aware of the scam when the phone company contacted them to try and collect the overdue bill. In most cases, the persons whose names appeared on the accounts could show that they had never even been in the San Pedro facility.

Agents said they had been working on the case for a year and a half. They said they found that facturas or sales slips showing the purchase of cell telephones could be traced to a store that is in this business. In fact, some of the phones used in the scam had been stolen and reworked with a new chip provided by the telephone company customer service workers, agents said.

Two cell phone sales outlets were among the places raided Tuesday. Also raided were three homes, two in La Unión de Cartago and one in Hatillo, as well as the San Pedro telephone company agency.

Agents, who are working the Sección de Fraudes of the Judicial Investigating Organization, said they found more cell telephones of suspicious origin in the raids as well as documents.

Public employee union members are going on strike today, a day earlier than announced last week. Workers from the state monopolies are expected to gather at Parque Central for a march around noon. Children will be excused from many schools at 10 a.m. as teachers join the protest.

The strike originally was planned to continue the protest against the free trade treaty with the United States. But now there are other factors. Union members are upset by court decisions nullifying certain benefits provided to workers.

Employees from the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad, the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social, public education and the Instituto Nacional de Seguros will be in the streets, likely supported by students from the Universidad de Costa Rica in San Pedro and the Universidad Nacional in Heredia. The Heredia institution already has formally rejected the trade treaty.

Strikers are expected to march east to the Corte Suprema de Justicia where the Sala IV constitutional court is located. A statement by the public employees union called the constitutional court the spear point in eliminating the benefits obtained in the past by public workers.

The court has acted on appeals by the Movimiento Libertario to end extensive payoffs to employees and even the right of the national refinery worker’s union to get a free vehicle from the company.

The Asociación Nacional de Empleados Públicos y Privados said that the court action is an effort to reduce the standard of living of Costa Rican workers to the level of others in Central America.

The unions also say that the free trade treaty jeopardizes public education and would lead to privatization of utilities like water.