Sophos Cloud Optix
Remember pre-Voice-over-IP, back when long-distance calls were expensive, and you had to hunt down employees and beat them up to keep calls short?
There are still ways to rack up breathtakingly expensive phone bills, even with most corporate phone lines now running over the internet.
One example is when modern-day phreakers – phone hackers – break in to companies’ phone networks and stick businesses with horrific bills for calls they never made.
According to the industry group Communications Fraud Control Association, online shysters have managed to rip off small businesses by using their phone lines to route premium-rate calls – typically used for sex chat or psychics’ lines – to the tune of $4.73 billion worth of fraud globally last year.
One of those businesses is a US architecture firm in San Francisco which was looking at a bill of $166,000 for calls made over only one weekend in March, the New York Times reports.
That’s a lot of dialing for an office that was completely empty of employees over the weekend.
It turned out that crooks had broken into the phone network at the company, Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture, and routed the calls from the firm and on to premium-rate telephone numbers in Gambia, Somalia and the Maldives.
The firm reportedly claimed in a complaint to the Federal Communications Commission that, given its typical phone usage, it would have taken far more than a weekend – more like 35 years – to tally up $166,000 worth of calls.
Telecommunications fraud experts told the New York Times that this is how the premium-service scheme works:
- Criminals sign up to lease premium-rate phone numbers from one of dozens of web-based services that charge dialers over $1 a minute (£.62) and give the lessee a cut – as high as 24 cents (£.15) for every minute spent on the phone.
- Next, the crooks break into a business’s phone system and make calls through it to their premium number. They typically do it over a weekend, when nobody’s around to notice. High-speed computers enable hundreds of simultaneous calls, forwarding as many as 220 minutes’ worth of phone calls a minute to the pay line.
- The intruder gets their share of the charges, typically sent via a Western Union, MoneyGram or wire transfer.
Phone fraud is as old as dirt. Nineteen years ago, The Independent was writing about the advertising agency J Walter Thompson, which was then considering suing British Telecom, after phone crooks exploited flaws in a switchboard sold by BT to fleece the company out of £60,000 ($96,777 USD) worth of free calls over the course of four days.
So shouldn’t carriers be on top of stopping this well-known fraud by now?
According to the New York Times, they are – at least, the major carriers are. Not only do they have sophisticated fraud systems set up to stop the phone leeches before they bleed a company out of six figures; they can also afford to credit customers who get bilked for millions of bogus charges every year.
However, smaller local carriers, which are often used by small businesses, lack such deluxe anti-fraud systems.
It’s also harder for them to cover the cost of fraud. Hence, they often leave their customers stuck with crippling bills.
In the US, the law isn’t helping much, given that carriers aren’t required to cover fraud as credit card companies do.
After a rash of swindles hit businesses in Albany, New York last year, Senator Charles E. Schumer urged the FCC to adopt new regulations. Nothing’s happened yet, though a staffer in the senator’s office said that he’s “still in favor” of new regulations.
Like many internet-enabled crimes, it’s tough to catch the culprits, given that premium-rate service fraud can cross multiple jurisdictions.
Bob Foreman, who owns the architecture firm, told the newspaper that his firm hadn’t even realized such a scam was a risk – as telecom expert Jim Dalton put it, a “six-figure liability waiting to happen.”
His advice for businesses to avoid getting scammed:
- Turn off call forwarding.
- Set up strong passwords for voice mail systems and for placing international calls.
- Treat your phones as internet-connected machines. Criminals have already begun to do so.
We know that small businesses face big impediments to get security right: they’re heavily dependent on computers but might not be big enough to have dedicated IT staff.
With that in mind, we came up with these ways to avoid the 4 password mistakes that small companies tend to make.
A couple more resources that might prove useful are our 4 free tools to boost your security, and our 3 essential security tasks (the tasks are aimed at families, but they’re great advice for micro-businesses, too).
Image of man on phone and office phone courtesy of Shutterstock.
Your choice of slang, especially in the use of “shyster,” is not very professional and will be viewed as offensive by some, particularly many jews who that word has commonly been used to disparage.
Many people attempt to claim different etymologies for that word by tracing it back to the German word for “shit”, but the word, “negra” and “negro” are Spanish words for black, too. We all know how that latter word had been used in the U.S. “Shyster” is spelled with an Americanized ending rather than the German, which would have been merely, “er,” further demonstrating the Americanized usage of a German word… the German etymology is the one used by Wikipedia in an attempt to strongly insinuate that the word is merely German and was never meant to be anti-semitic.
However, as writers, our reputations don’t tend to be saved by etymologies when it comes to high offense experienced by one group or another. Your reputation is in jeopardy with that word included in your report, not merely because of its claimed offense, but also because it is *slang* and slang never belongs in a professional report, for exactly this reason. It is much easier to avoid faux pas if slang and cliché are not used at all.
We do tend to get slangy around here, and I appreciate your advice, but I personally prefer written speech that approximates real life, and many readers do as well. Bilious and/or stiff, “business”-like speech or written renditions of it make me fall asleep at my keyboard, and I’ve already messed up one laptop by spilling soymilk on it and don’t want to drool my current one into breakdown mode. 😉
I’m inclined to side with Wikipedia on this one. The word is defined, as Wikipedia notes, by Merriam-Webster http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shyster as meaning a dishonest person.
The simplest common meaning—a dishonest person—is the meaning I intended.
The definition, and especially the derivation, seem to depend (strongly) on which dictionary you are using. Collins derives from “shy” (in the sense of “not quite right”, as in “a couple of pounds shy”), while the American Heritage Dictionary derives it from a 19th-century crooked lawyer by the name of Scheuster. Both dictionaries’ definitions start with crooked lawyers, and by (extension) dishonest people in general.
I do recall that the Marx Brothers, before their film careers, starred in a radio series (about a crooked and inept law firm) called Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel.
Utterly fascinating. Your tirade, which had absolutely nothing to do with this very interesting article, aroused my curiosity, so I looked up “shyster.” Thesaurus.com lists two pages of synonyms and related words for “shyster,” and none of them have anything to do with the Semites. While there is a note in the “shyster” entry in wikipedia which cites the possibility of an anti-Semitic source, but it also says that no proof can be found for that claim. The cited article is very interesting, states that “…shyster appeared first in the New York newspaper The Subterranean in July 1843, at first in spellings such as shyseter and shiseter but almost immediately settling down to the form we use now.”
Now, on to more important matters. What did you think of the article itself? Personally I found it to be a good read, and will be forwarding it to the rest of our IT staff.
Barbara, you’re argument is null and holds no weight seeing as you used Wikipedia as your “source”.
As a writer, you should know well enough that Wikipedia is not a reliable cite to source for information. Your reputation is in jeopardy if you openly claim to using wikipedia as a source in an argument LOL.
Learn how to spell before giving advice to one who knows how to spell as well as use words properly/ punctuation. She did an awesome job with this article. God bless
What I don’t quite understand is how and why money is apparently so easily transferred from the carrier to the premium-rate operators. Is it because the carriers in turn get their share from premium-rate calls that they agree to bear the whole risk and compensate the operators in any case?
Given the many ways it can be abused it’s a skewed concept that when a number is dialed and ‘something’ picks up on the other end a contract is concluded which, it seems, can’t be contested.
Come on.. Shyster is defined as – a person, especially a lawyer, who uses unscrupulous, fraudulent, or deceptive methods in business.
Maybe to you it is associated with Jews but for me, it’s not. Showing the soles of your feet is considered offensive in some countries. Doesn’t mean the rest of the world feels the same.
Maybe she was thinking of “Shylock” as being disrespectful.