Re: Misterious Papua phone calls in telco bill

From: Bill Unruh (unruh_at_string.physics.ubc.ca)
Date: 09/30/04 

Date: 29 Sep 2004 23:57:32 GMT

"Faustino Dina" <ffdina@matusa.com.mx> writes:

]I signed for a home internet service recently with my local phone service
]provider. When I check my monthly bill, it is a international call to Papua
](New Guinea?) that I didn't do. Calling to my phone service provider it says
]that that call was made while I was connected to the Internet, when visiting
]some xxx pages. They said that the phone company has some kind of
]arrangement with such web sites therefore any visit to these paid pages are
]billed to the originating phone company and the telco bills me. I never
]heard something like that. I was confident the only way to bill on the web
]was by using a credit card or other services like PayPal that at the end of
]the chain also requires a credit card or bank account.
]Anyway, the real problem is that for second month the telco is billing me
]another call to Papua, and this time I'm 100% sure nobody went to any payed
]web site. Telco says that just visiting once such a page, it can be making
]international calls despite you are not visiting the page. So it looks like
]a virus, trojan, spyware or something alike.
]Do you have notice of such way of "doing bussiness"? I mean, pay per view
]web sites that bill clients by using the user's service provider telephone
]company?

Sure. There are millions of ways of separating suckers from their money.
This is another one.

]How can I protect from such viruses? (Telco said I should format the hard
]disk to be sure)

Do not visit such web sites.

One way they do it, is that they install an activeX which hangs up the
phone, and switches off the sound on the modem, and then makes a long
distance call to remote site.

Yes, you should wipe the disk and reinstall to make sure that the virus is
no longer there.

Anyway, you should dispute the bill with your telco as well.

Relevant Pages

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