Phone Becomes Alibi for Liars

02:00 AM May. 14, 2004 PT

Cell-phone users who want to get out of work or a dreaded dinner date now have a handy excuse.

A group of 2,000 cell-phone owners have formed an "alibi and excuse club," in which one member lies on behalf of another.

The club's founder, identified only as "Numbrrrs," says the group came in handy for her recently before a blind date. She had another member of the club call up her date to tell him she couldn't make it because she left the country.

"I was just tired," said Numbrrrs, a 28-year-old airline customer service representative from San Diego.

Numbrrrs' club is modeled after a trend she witnessed during a real trip out of the country, to Europe. In Germany, she learned that cell-phone users often download background noise of traffic jams and then play the sounds when they phone their bosses or spouses to say that they're late. While someone close to the club admitted the ethics surrounding that application is a bit dubious, the software's creators insist that people are only having fun.

"It's a way to make jokes," said Liviu Tofan, the CEO of Simeda, the German company responsible for the SounderCover application.

SounderCover lets mobile-phone users download prerecorded sounds that mimic the noises of a traffic jam, a circus parade, a thunderstorm, a ringing phone -- or even a self-created sound. It's compatible with certain Nokia phones, which mainly run on the cellular-phone networks in Europe.

SMS.ac, an online group of 10 million wireless phone users (including Numbrrrs), plans to partner with another vendor and offer the sound effects to its members by June, said Greg Wilfahrt, the company's executive vice president.

"It's coming as a result of the person-to-person clubs," he said. "I think the whole thing is ridiculously funny, how people are using their phones to communicate now."

SMS.ac's technology lets practically any wireless-device user send a short text message or multimedia message to another subscriber. The service lets members, such as Numbrrrs, start clubs and send each other blast messages that include pictures, music and video clips.

But up to now, if members of Numbrrrs' club wanted to become someone else's alibi, they had to do so manually. This involved picking up the phone to let the boss know of a buddy's tardiness or to make a friend's wife believe her husband has an important meeting when he's really at the bar.

Wilfahrt admits that some people -- especially those who have found out they were conned -- have a problem with mobile alibis "from an integrity standpoint."

But Simeda's Tofan said the application, strangely enough, has made people more polite in their phone conversations. People often play prerecorded music to lighten the mood of a conversation.

"It doesn't encourage people to lie," he said. "It encourages people to find excuses.... Finding an excuse is a better way to get out of a situation than (saying), 'I don't want to talk to you' -- which is rude."

Still, both Numbrrrs and Chris Mowan, a 20-year-old Colorado college student and fellow alibi club member, expressed unease at having a piece of software do their dirty work for them.

"I would rather have a person other than me do it instead of noise in the background, because I don't know how good of a liar I am," Mowan said.

Numbrrrs said she was sure many people, tickled by the novelty of it, would pass around the alibis, rendering them obsolete in time of need.

"I wonder if they already heard that noise from someone else, then they'd think it was a crank call or something," she said.