LAS VEGAS, where every born loser is told he is a potential winner, has always had a way with words. Prostitution is technically illegal in the city. But a private “dance” in one's hotel room is not—even if that's just a euphemism for what a “Hot Nude Blonde” does to cheer up a visiting conventioneer.

How exactly these private dancers know which hotel rooms to visit, though, has become a thorny question. On March 14th, as The Economist went to press, a hearing began at the Nevada Public Utilities Commission to investigate a complaint brought by Eddie Munoz against Central Telephone, a local subsidiary of Sprint. Mr Munoz operates an in-room “adult entertainment” service. He also publishes the Las Vegas Informer, a free paper that lists telephone numbers for his dancing troupe.

He alleges that rival operators have hacked into the Las Vegas telephone network and systematically diverted calls made from hotel rooms to the numbers listed in the Informer to their own services. These rivals then send out their own entertainers to do the dancing—and to collect the fees that should rightfully be his. Mr Munoz says that in the heady days of the early 1990s he was making $20,000 a month from his cut of the money earned by his dancers.

Telephone firms habitually deny that hackers can break in. Sprint maintains that it “has neither found nor been presented with any evidence to date that calls have been diverted”. Others are not so sure. Hilda Brauer, who protested that call-poachers had driven her “Sexy Girls” service out of business, brought a lawsuit against Sprint and her rivals in 1998, but dropped it when her money ran out. In 1998 the FBI arrested six gangsters who were scouring Las Vegas to recruit a telephone hacker they believed was working for a successful call-girl service (although nobody found him).

Mr Munoz has now hired Kevin Mitnick, a hacker who boasted last year to SecurityFocus, an online technology journal, that he used to break into Las Vegas switching systems. Mr Mitnick has diverted Mr Munoz's telephone lines to an office in Los Angeles; a temp there relays the requests for dancers back to Mr Munoz in Las Vegas. The aim is to cut Sprint out of the loop.

The hearings may shed more light on how the world's oldest profession has taken phone-hacking in its well-practised stride. And then, no doubt, as the fuss dies down, it will discreetly dim the lights and get on with business as usual.