Voce phone users are cut off

"Rejected connection."

It was another way of saying his high-end phone was suddenly as useful for making calls as a pair of Prada pumps.

But fashion was not to blame. The problem was with the premium cellphone service Voce, which mysteriously shut down Friday.

The abrupt end of service from Beverly Hills-based Voce, which had advertised from billboards in tony shopping districts and had sales booths in Neiman Marcus stores, left subscribers scrambling for alternative service and frustrated that they couldn't reach anyone at the company.

"I called the customer service number at Voce and it just rang and rang," said Goetz, who owns a digital design firm in Long Beach.

Subscribers posted frantic notes on online forums, sharing information and tips on porting numbers over to other cell companies.

And many discovered they had something else in common -- in the last couple of weeks, they said, the company had attempted to bill their bank accounts double the rate for a month's service.

When Voce debuted in 2006, subscribers paid a $500 sign-up fee and $200 a month for unlimited minutes. Also included: a new high-end phone every year and unlimited use of the concierge service.

Last year, in an attempt to attract more customers, the sign-up fee was eliminated and the monthly fee set at $118 for 2,000 talk minutes and 5 megabytes of data. Subscribers were charged extra for new phones.

Voce had been having financial woes of late, said Roy Kosuge, who until recently was the chief operating officer.

The ownership of Voce's parent, Faith Communications Inc., was transferred in a cashless transaction last month to investment firm SunCal Midwest, also known as SunCal Funds, based in Chicago, Kosuge said. (A spokesman for real estate developer SunCal Cos. in Irvine said it is not related to the Chicago company.) He said employees haven't been paid since the transfer.

Kosuge said he found out he had been fired when his company phone was disconnected. "They said to take a Friday off," he said. "Then I noticed my access to [company] e-mail had disappeared."

E-mail requests for interviews with SunCal Funds weren't answered.

The cellphone number for the head of SunCal Funds, Brian Richards, has been disconnected. It was a Voce line.