Telling anecdote about US views on prepay mobile

I'm at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm in London this morning. I just heard a comment which, to me, epitomises the difference between US views on prepaid mobile versus most of the rest of the world. It was made by someone who looks at subscriber data management, talking about crunching data for a "hypothetical" prepay provider.

Setting the scene, he referred to the likelihood that c50% of users would be "illegal immigrants or former convicts".

Utterly amazing. I've always recognised that prepaid had a stigma amongst many people in North America, but I hadn't realised it was that bad.