Telephone Scams

Any similar experiences??

[austtr]

I use a dedicated phone line to a dial-up modem for all web & email connections. All dial-ups are billed as a local call. In the latest phone bill for the line I'm seeing around $100 worth of international charges.

They appear on the bill as "internet dialer", all to the same number within a 24 hour period, and I am wondering if I have been the target of a scam. In the deep dark recesses of my diminishing memory bank I seem to recall a story about scams that involved phone calls.

Is this ringing any bells for anyone? Comments appreciated.

[bartek]

My guess is that you have an executable trojan dialer running and making calls for you. Usually dials long or very long distance calls.
Check your machines for funny looking exe's.

[Drastic]

I vaguely remember something about this from many months ago. Certain types of sites had some kind of scam that would charge on your local phone bill. There was some discussion somewhere, but I can't find it.

Anyone remember any details?

[linkshark]

Sounds like a P*rn site dialer. A very common way for adduult webmasters to make a dishonest buck. Tempted with "click here to watch the movie" users are duped into downloading very aggressive .exe files. These in turn cause your machine to dial an offshore # for dial up access. Because the charges are offshore it makes it nearly impossible to have them reversed. It works like an affiliate program, the dishonest webmasters are paid $0.50 - $1.50 / minute for every minute they get some unsuspecting surfer to be charged by the offshore company. The .exe file will place itself all over your machine, desktop, program files, automatically add itself to your "internet connection" list, etc...... You must search the whole machine for the "name" of the dialer program and remove it, as it tends to hide itself everywhere.

I am sure that this can be rigged to other than p*rn sites. Like a dialer from an offshore internet access site. In other words, you don't necessarily have to be surfing aaadduult site to pick one of these up. Imagine being connected all day to your business related surfing for $10.00 / minute, without knowing.

Below is an excerpt from a dialer site.

*****************

Start Making Tons of Money Right Now !

It's very simple. After you sign up and your account is approved, we will send you your own custom made phone dialer to upload to your server. You will want to check out our sales tools to see how best to advertise the dialer for your particular site. Once you have the ads in place and the dialer up on your server, you are ready to go! The only rule we have is that you cannot use the word "free" anywhere in your ad. You can use any number of popups, exit consoles, blind links, you name it. When the surfer clicks on your ad, the dialer software is downloaded on to the surfer's desktop................

..........You get paid every minute your dialer is in use, no matter how many people are using it! A bit more information can be found in the "FAQ" section of the site. We have live 24/7 stats, great rates and kick @ss customer service!

Start making tons of money right now!

[austtr]

Thanks for the comments.... sure enough, I found an offending exe on the machine. We are not patrons of adult sites so my guess is that some other type of site was used as the delivery agent for the exe.

Heads up, there are some very ugly people out there... as if you didn't already know.