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Sprint Cracks Down on TTY Relay Abuses
An anonymous reader writes "Sprint thinks it has found a way to keep West African scam artists from using Sprint's deaf-relay service to defraud people." Our previous two stories have background information.
The only way to rid this planet of the scum who make the average person surrender privacy and convenience is to take them out. The punishment has got to be bad enough to stop them -- and the only thing I see working is a silent assassin taking them down one by one. Any international assassins want to volunteer?
Sprint has block to halt scam in place
By Tim Steller
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
Operators at a Northwest Side call center may see some relief from the flood of fraudulent calls they've been handling by scam artists in other countries trying to defraud American merchants
Sprint has put in place a system to block calls by suspicious users of its Internet-relay service for the hearing- and speech-impaired.
The effort answers operators' complaints that scam artists from Nigeria, Ghana and other places have been using the system to buy American goods using stolen credit-card numbers. But not everyone is convinced the strategy will work over the long run, because scam artists may adapt.
Since January, relay operators at Communication Service for the Deaf, a call center at Foothills Mall, have spent much of their time handling thousands of calls from such scam artists.
These callers access the relay service intended for deaf people simply by getting on a Web site operated by Sprint, entering a phone number and pressing a "connect" button. The operators act as intermediaries, talking to the person receiving the call and typing messages back to the original caller.
Because federal regulations require the operators to transmit all calls faithfully and confidentially, they have been forced into facilitating fraud. About 200 people work at CSD, as the Tucson call center is known.
Sprint spokesman Steve Lunceford, would not detail how Sprint is trying to block the calls other than to say the company is looking at problematic Internet-protocol addresses and finding ways to block them before calls go through to operators.
So far, the effort appears successful. The volume of Internet-relay calls has returned to the level it was in early January, before massive abuse of the system began, Lunceford said.
CSD call-center manager Paul Hawkins declined to comment, as did several current CSD operators.
On the surface, the effort appears similar to those carried out by MCI and AT&T. Since late last year, MCI has been measuring daily which Internet-protocol addresses are using the system in high volumes, analyzing the usage, then blocking suspicious sources of calls, said Steven Johnson, MCI's vice president of information services and solutions.
AT&T has been blocking Internet protocol addresses from other countries, an approach that has been very successful, according to a company statement.
But one former MCI relay operator said blocking internet addresses will only be a temporary obstacle for abusers of the Internet-relay system. That's because the scam artists can continuously find alternative Internet-protocol addresses, said Rob Grodevant of Madison, Wis., who moderates an Internet message board for relay operators.
"Obviously it's had the effect of cutting down these calls, but they're going to find new hosts and call back anyway," Grodevant said. "It's always going to be a cat-and-mouse game."
Grodevant would prefer a system in which legitimate users register in advance to gain access to the system.
In March, the volume of calls exceeded 7,000 per day at Tucson's CSD, which is a contractor for Sprint, according to a company memo. Operators reported going through entire shifts without receiving calls from deaf Americans, but only from scam artists, largely located in West Africa.
The situation was so stressful that the company offered counseling to its operators. One former relay operator, Eric Reeves, said via e-mail that he quit in March in part because of the change from helping deaf people to aiding scam artists.
"After we started taking the calls for the villains overseas, the atmosphere was depressing and overall gloomy," Reeves said.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess