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“Here, no one can pinch my bottom or call me a fat slag, as they do when I’m dancing in strip bars. It’s easier here because I’m not looking into their faces, I don’t have to see what is in their souls”Phreak outHow sex hackers could treble your domestic phone billsWhen journalist Ruth Battish discovered her quarterly telephone bill had soared from pounds 150 to pounds 441, she demanded an itemised bill from BT. It is billed as live visual interaction, the ultimate threat to sex chat lines Users pay by credit card. Wearing black bra and knickers and high heels, Lynda faces a video camera.

Her instructions flash up on a computer screen: “Take your top off…” And so it goes on, until she is completely naked, obligingly posing full frontal for the invisible viewer. The service allows Internet users to type in instructions for Lynda to strip from their home computers Customers log in from as far away as Australia. “I never really liked her talking dirty to other men.” Tricia admits she would not be happy knowing Nigel used the service. “Although I would rather he do that than have an affair.”Meanwhile, in a photographic studio at the Surrey offices of Gold Star Publications – publishers of such top-shelf magazines as Parade – Lynda Leigh, a nude model and dancer is about to start work, providing “sex on the Internet”. But at times you suspect that they remain ambivalent about the source of income which supports their comfortable lifestyle.Nigel admits he is relieved that his wife no longer takes the calls.

We do not go beyond what you might get pictorially in a top-shelf magazine, nothing illegal,” he says. The conversations the women will have are truly obscene and disgusting. “Our girls work alone, from home, they are paid well and promptly. They are not forced to do anything,” says Tricia defensively “We are naughty, but nice.. the third social service. We should be provided on the NHS.” Nigel insists that they are opposed to the international telephone sex lines: “Because these lines are abroad and more difficult to police, anything goes. They take terrible abuse from the punters but dare not hang up because they have to keep the men on the telephone, running up a bill. These places are often run like sweatshops, with a group of women and their telephones sitting around a table.

The women are exhausted and the level of depression is high.”Tricia and Nigel Jones, members of their local Chamber of Commerce, present themselves as the respectable face of the industry. A Cap spokeswoman says: “Most of the women on the chat lines are black, having to pretend to be white to fulfil men’s fantasies. They are often single mothers on benefits, who are paid pro-rata. According to ICSTIC, such international calls operate from 40 countries world-wide and last year generated $2 billion.Other sex chat companies circumvented the restrictions by setting up credit card systems, whereby the customer pays first, and a woman then calls him back.