I just got off the phone with my friend (really seriously, this is not a “my friend, but I mean me” story :)). He was calling me from work as his home phone is now disconnected and has a lien on it, due to a 350 dollar bill.
It turns out that earlier this week he was surfing the net and clicked OK on what looked like an innocent looking text box. After he clicked he heard his modem drop carrier and start to redial… he started clicking on his modem settings to try and figure out what was happening, and after about 5 seconds he pulled the power on the PC. It was too late. He now has on his bill a 350 dollar call to an international porn line. Amazing, a 3 second call can cost you 350 bucks.
He lamented “I didn’t even get to hear what 350 dollar porn sounds like…”.
He has tried several times to get the call waived, but he is dealing with a tiny phone/cable company (not one of the Bells), and their customer service sucks. They stand by the fact that he called the number and a service was provided. He points out that a 3 second service is hardly worth 350 dollars and they just shrug their shoulders.
I’ve heard of the bigger phone companies protecting their customers and waiving bills from obvious scams, but I guess my friend is out of luck here. I suggested that he look into scam protection on his credit card (which he uses to pay his phone bill) and see if it would extend to this problem.
There is a couple of lessons to be learned here I guess.
Never click any OK/Yes message boxes unless it is from a trusted site.
If you hear your modem dialing without you pull the plug RIGHT AWAY!
If you never call international numbers, you can request from your phone company to have international numbers blocked. There is always operator assisted calling if you do need to call internationally.
Is there really such a thing as html code or some other kind of web based script that will
force a carrier drop of the currently used modem
and
force said modem to dial another phone number?
If there really is such a thing…I withdraw my bs remark…and offer my apologies. Right now though…it sounds kind of fishy. (nothing turned up on snopes though fwiw)
Yes there is, it was an artical on cnet about 1-2 yrs ago on this.
Also have your ‘friend’ (yea we know it’s you) contact your states PSC (public service comm.), have, ahem, your friend explain what happened and they might contact that phone company on your behalf. Any mailings you, I mean your friend, do to the local phone company cc to the PSC. The PSC is very powerful and is on the customers side, they can fine the telco heavily for a minor infraction.
Hmm…now do these things require a modem? Or can they make a long-distance call through my broadband connection? I mean, there are ways to make outgoing calls from a PC that has a broadband connection (going through other servers that have a modem and so forth,) so can the porn companies redirect my connection to a server with a modem and charge it’s bill to me somehow?
Thanks for the good advice kanicbird. I assume the PSC advice would be great for Americans, but I’m in the Great White North so that complicates things a bit. This happened in the province of Nova Scotia (further proof that it’s not me! I’m in Ontario ;)), so I’m not sure what other outside sources are available to take a look at this.
beagledave - No worries about the BS detector. Mine twitched a little too until I read up on it.
Maybe Hardygrrl will stop by and let me know if a credit card company would consider this fraud and reverse the charges. I’m thinking no, as the phone bill is legit and the contents of the phone bill is not their concern. However, it may worth looking into.
On preview, bouv, I don’t think you have to worry. If somehow someone did force a Voice over IP call from your PC, the charge would be attached to the gateway modem and not your connection. I don’t even know if that is possible though.
In this case, since it can be argued that the customer did not knowingly participate in the charge, it’s fraud.
Also, most key entered transactions are what we call “automatic chargebacks”. The merchant cannot prove the true customer used the account - no swiped card, no signature - and by V/M guidelines, loses the money.
How is it credit card fraud, hardygrrl? He’s knowingly paying his phone bill with the credit card. It’s the phone bill charges that are arguably fraudulent, but if the phone company will not waive them, I don’t see any real recourse. A lawyer might be able to help, but that would probably cost more than the bill itself.
I’ve seen gas stations at which you can swipe a credit card, enter the cardholder’s ZIP code, and be home free. Shouldn’t use of a credit card require- well- anything else?
Still, your friend is at least lying somewhat, I think. The scam is well-known, but to rack up $350 you’d have to be connected a little while longer, methinks. I think he spent a few hours downloading, and only realised it when the bill came in.
I think it should, but it’s a case of conveinence winning over security. We do get a lot of fraud from gas pumps. The zip code entry only works if it’s not the same zip code as the gas station or the perp didn’t steal the entire wallet and have access to the information.
If the phone bill was paid by credit card, the case can be made that if it wasn’t made clear that clicking the box would result in the call and therefore the charges, the customer had no way of knowing they would be billed.
Yup, these things are real as heck. Little parable from the mouth of the Welbster.
When I owned my ISP I was contacted by a furtive woman who explained to me that she felt her computer had been hacked through my internet service. She was actually whispering, as if the hackers could listen to her.
I explained that something like that was very unlikely. She said that the hackers had gotten her phone number, tapped into her phone system, used her credit cards, and used her phone to place international calls. She was even concerned that her house had been broken into by the hackers because some of the phone charges happened when she wasn’t at home. I told her to bring her computer in for me to take a look at.
After doing a little searching I found the dialer, which placed a 10-10-321 call to Austrailia to download porn. There was another program that called Europe. Both of them allowed scheduled downloads. The credit card charges were traced back to porn sites. Turns out her husband was quite the aficianado of the porno. To the tune of $1500.00 a month in phone and credit card charges.
His poor wife, to whom he insisted he had no idea what was going on, was getting ready to sell her house and move so that the “hackers” wouldn’t bother her anymore. She was pissed, and rightly so.
Moral of the story? That’s for you to figure out. I’m not your mother.
A year ago I or one of my daughters must have clicked on a link to start one of those dialers. (The connection was made at a time none of us are routinely on the web so I don’t know who was responsible.) Our phone bill came with a $50 charge for a 2-minute call to a 976 number. I did a search for the name and number from the bill and came up with the company that sets up the service, not the destination of the call so I don’t know who or where we were connected to.
I called our local phone company to have them block calls to 900 numbers from our phone line (but I was willing to pay for the call in question). The woman I spoke with said she had the authority to remove one call like that from our bill if there was a question about it, so she removed the charge, which was very nice of her.
Three months later another $50 charge to a 976 number shows up on our bill. I called the phone company again and found out that those companies have up to 1 year to put the charge on your phone bill. In my case, since I had placed a block on 900 numbers three months earlier she removed the second one also, which was really nice of her.
I was amazed that they can charge you up to 1 year after the call. They know that no one will remember details of their web surfing several months later and stick you with a bill when it is hard to deny that you didn’t make the connection.
You may be right, I don’t know for sure. Everything I’ve read up on these point to a per minute usage, but I’ve seen claims of 30,000 dollar phone bills so the per minute cost of some of these has got to be huge.
Hardygrrl, thanks for the info/clarification. I’m not sure if it will fly for my friend, but I’ll let him know.
I don’t know but have heard that Canadian Telco’s are much harder to deal with then the ones in the States. See if you have a equivliant to the PSC.
Also your friend if he has broadband can tell the telco to screw itself and just sign up with an internet telephone company. Something like vodephone or vodphone lookd very good, just search for internet telephone and it should come up.
All sorts of innocent-looking sites try to insert dialers into your computer, and you might not know if one is there – open ‘My Computer,’ click on the ‘C’ drive, open the ‘Programs’ folder, and look for a folder named ‘Web Dialer.’ Stupid of them to make it that easy, huh? Deleting the folder without opening it usually works, but sometimes it won’t delete all the files and you have to shut down the computer, then reboot before you can kill the strays, so it helps to open the folder and write down the file names. Then go into ‘Control Panel,’ click on the ‘Add/Delete Programs,’ and take out anything that refers either to a Web Dialer or the specific name of the one you got hit with.
