This is the strategy I've come up with to mitigate their impact on my daily life. You can't prevent your phone from responding to a call (without crazy jailbreak hacks) but you can control how it responds.

1. I have created an entry in my contact book with the name Spam Caller.
2. I then attached a silent ringtone to that contact and set their vibration alert to None.
3. Every time I get a call from a new spammer I add their number to this contact.
4. Voilà my phone now essentially ignores their calls. The next time I pick up my phone I'll see a missed call from Spam Caller which I know I can safely ignore.

   Here is a silent ringtone I created for this purpose: Silent Ringtone

AT&T Shamed to Drop $1 Million Lawsuit Against Customer Over Fraudulent Calls Stop the Cap!

July 9, 2012

Michael Smith and his 14 employees can now sleep again after AT&T dropped a $1.15 million lawsuit against Smith's small manufacturing company after the story went viral.

The lawsuit was filed over fraudulent long distance calls placed through Smith's PBX phone system to the war-torn nation of Somalia over a four day period in 2009.

Smith discovered the fraud after getting long distance bills totaling $891,470 the following month.

More than $260,000 of additional charges were billed by Verizon, Smith's landline phone company, and Verizon forgave those charges a few months after Smith filed a billing dispute. Verizon noticed the unusual calling activity and temporarily suspended Smith's international long distance service. The phone hackers then simply used a "dial-around" long distance access code for AT&T to keep the calls going through, resulting in a huge bill from AT&T, which charged $22 a minute for the calls.

Unlike Verizon, AT&T wanted its money and despite multiple attempts to get credit for the fraudulent long distance calls, AT&T refused to relent, filing suit against Smith for the full cost of the fraudulent calls, plus interest.

Smith told a Salem, Mass. newspaper if he paid the bill, it would force his company into bankruptcy and put his 14 employees on the unemployment line.

The company claims in its lawsuit Smith should have known better - securing his PBX system more effectively against international long distance fraud and that under Federal Communications Commission regulations, AT&T is entitled to collect from the owner of the phone line, regardless of who actually made the call.

Smith told The Salem News he's tried to resolve the matter, even reaching out to the CEO of AT&T, but a secretary at the company called and said that once AT&T refers a case to outside counsel, they are done talking.

AT&T later offered to waive the accumulating interest charges on the unpaid balance (now $197,000 and growing) if Smith paid the company $891,470 for the phone calls to Somalia.

Smith filed a countersuit instead, claiming AT&T is abusing the legal process and violating Massachusetts consumer protection laws. A judge was pushing the case to mediation.

Smith's interview with the Salem newspaper came at additional risk: AT&T's lawyers threatened they would take action if he "disparaged" the company's name in the media.

After the story ran nationwide this morning on the Associated Press wire service, the company suddenly dropped the case.

In a statement sent to the media, AT&T writes it is no longer pursuing its claims against Michael Smith, of Ipswich, "though we are entitled by law to collect the amounts owed."

Consumerist

How To Fight Phone Bill Cramming

ArsTechnica writer Nate Anderson was a recent "cramming" victim, and he wrote about his experience tracking down who was behind it. Cramming is a scam where third-party groups tell your phone company to bill you for "services," services you never signed up for, and the phone company happily obliges, taking a cut of the fee. The phone company does no verification and all the scammer needs is your phone number. In Nate's case, he was signed up for three different voicemail services and email-forwarding service, three at $14.95 per month, and one at $12.95, doubling his telephone bill. Snooping around, he found the companies behind it were ILD and ESBI, and scores of cramming complaints about these "companies" littered the internet. Luckily he was able to get refunds without difficulty (crammers often make it easy to cancel so you don't go complaining to any law enforcement bodies) only providing just as much information as these con-artists used to flimflam him in the first place: his phone number. So how can you fight a crammer?

1. Watch your bills for suspicious charges.
2. If you see a fee for a service you never ordered, contact the "service" provider and request a refund.
3. Ask your phone company about how to remove erroneous charges.
4. File an FTC complaint.
5. After you get your money back, ask your phone company to put a block against third-party charges on your account.

Cram this: a firsthand account of my recent cramming [Ars Technica] (Thanks to John!)

Fighting Phone Spam

March 14, 2008

There is one partial solution to the problem described in the March 10 front-page article "Advertising Sent to Cellphones Opens New Front in War on Spam": Allow customers to opt out of all text messaging. Not all of us use our cellphones as general communication devices; some people are satisfied to let a phone be just a phone.

I know more than 25 people who have asked their wireless providers to disable text messaging for their accounts, only to be told that it could not be done, which I doubt. A more likely explanation is that these companies like getting paid for mistaken text messages.

The companies should voluntarily institute an opt-out policy or, loath as I am to suggest a new law, Congress should require that they do so, with hefty fines for noncompliance.

There is also a more technologically complex solution to this problem. Instead of making recipients pay for the text messages, make the sender pay for them. Yes, it would cost banks, travel firms and other businesses that text useful information, but they could pass those charges on to their customers.

Tag Archive for telephone-based fraud - TRUSTID Automatic Caller Authentication

Re-establishing Caller ID as a trusted source for customer authentication

Posted on: August 29th, 2012 by art From a security standpoint, Caller ID, in recent years, has been dead in the water.

For decades, financial institutions relied on Caller ID and ANI to identify calling party numbers for things like new account applications, bank card activation, money transfers and servicing customers. But times have changed.

Today, criminals have access to too many tools, too many resources, and have gathered too much information they can use to socially engineer a bank's contact center. The Caller ID just happens to be the telephonic "mask" that crooks hide behind to fool unsuspecting call center agents into thinking they are someone else.

Criminals are so good at spoofing Caller ID and using personal information to defeat knowledge-based authentication (KBA) solutions that the Caller ID and ANI have become unvalidated claims that are no longer effective in customer identification. Yet, many banks still rely heavily on personally identifiable information (PII), including the Caller ID, to identify their customers.

Placing a high amount of trust in "what you know" methods of authentication today can leave your customers and confidential data vulnerable to sophisticated telephone-based scams. In fact, relying solely on KBA may be more dangerous than not using it at all. In other words, if a bank rep is fooled into believing the lie cooked up through Caller ID spoofing and social engineering, crooks have set the stage to commit fraud right under their nose. This alone should be enough to put financial institutions on guard, particularly as more and more studies find that telephone-based fraud is on the rise.

According to the recent Dark Reading article, "Phone Fraud Up 30 Percent," nine out of 10 U.S. banks have been targeted in one way or another by phone fraudsters. Apparently, it seems that criminals are using the telephone to defraud banks because it's easier to trick someone over the phone into divulging private information than getting passed a firewall or breaking into a website.

For some time now, Caller ID has not been a trustworthy source that banks can count on to validate their customers. But the TRUSTID® Physical Caller Authentication solution is changing all of that.

By automatically validating the physical location of the telephone calling into a contact center pre-answered, bank agents are no longer fooled by Caller ID spoofing or social engineering schemes because calls are validated before the phone is picked up. This innovative, proactive approach to customer authentication is helping re-establish Caller ID and ANI as trusted sources for authenticating customers and, once again, making the telephone channel a secure, cost-effective channel to do business and service customers.

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