Ireland Cracks Down on Online Scammers

bizpile writes "Ireland has decided to take some extreme measures to crack down on one type of online scam. They have decided to suspend direct dialing to 13 countries (mostly South Pacific Islands) in order to halt the use of auto-dialers. The measure, announced by Ireland's Commission for Communications Regulation, came in response to hundreds of consumer complaints about the scams. ComReg acknowledges that its move is extreme but says that previous efforts to raise awareness of the problem failed to significantly diminish complaints. ComReg will keep the block in place for six months, after which it will be reviewed. All direct-dial calls will initially be blocked, although the regulator is also compiling a "white list" of legitimate numbers that consumers have requested to call."

Comments

What's the scam ?

[Space cowboy]

I mean I can see that if it's just to make people pay when there's no need, it'd be a real pain where it hurts, but if it's to try and collect on that money (by setting up a high-cost line then using a virus/trojan to change the settings to dial it), there must be someone making money out of it. Surely it ought to be possible to track down by the payments ?

I suppose the line owner could claim innocence, but they'd have to be damn convincing about it if lots of people suddenly start dialling this high-cost line.

Simon

Re:What's the scam ?

[aug24]

Tariffs are paid between phone networks, then call revenues are paid on in the receiving country to the person/entity who owns the line. That person is 'somewhere else', obviously. Chuck a few paper companies in awkward places in the chain and you're stuffed.

The telcos can't ask their opposite numbers for details, and can't refuse to pay for certain numbers either. So blocking them at root is (a) their only option and (b) a jolly good idea because all the poor buggers like my brother (who got caught for 125gbp just the other day - bloody MS insecure ^&*&^%$) would find their net connection refused and realise that they're being done.

Justin.

Re:What's the scam ?

[jobsagoodun]

They already do delay it. There was a brilliant scam done to BT 10 years ago when premium lines first came out. The scammers got two offices, and put 20 phone lines into one, and 20 premium lines into the other. The bills for the premium lines got paid out (to the scammers) every 30 days, but the phone bills on the out going lines were payable every 90. So the scammers phoned up the premium lines from their outgoing lines & too two months money off BT.

At that point I think BT made the billing cycles the same!

Re:What's the scam ?

[Tim C]

a jolly good idea because all the poor buggers like my brother (who got caught for 125gbp just the other day - bloody MS insecure ^&*&^%$) would find their net connection refused and realise that they're being done

That's the other good thing about ADSL - I don't have to worry about shit like this. No (traditional) modem, no way it can dial out. Good job too, as in the past I've had to clean a handful of the little buggers off my girlfriend's PC.

Sucks to be caught out by this sort of thing though - hope your brother gets/got the money back.

How to deal with Spam/Scam

[CdBee]

Lesson One. Be a European regulatory authority!

BT, here in the UK, have been doing some similar actions recently although on a less extreme scale.(One of which is maximum cost control, they refuse to route any call where the cost is higher than the maximum cost for an inland premium-rate call in the UK).

Its good to see regulators and firms acting to protect the more clueless users from themselves, as long as it doesn't prevent people requesting a line be opened.

Lets loose premium rate dialup.

[pklong]

Why not just ban all premium rate dial up sites. They are just breeding grounds for porn sites and scams. I've yet to see a legitimate use for them. We could do without them.

If you want to charge for a service get the customer to enter their credit card details / set up an account. If you think they would be unwilling, then that speaks volumes about your business.

Pin codes on international/premium rate

[16K Ram Pack]

Maybe Windows should make it a little more difficult to go altering dial-up settings. How many users would mind a warning message saying "a program is trying to change your dial-up".

Does any spyware/anti-virus software check this (and I don't mean check for a piece of particular spyware, but check the behaviour).

Extreme but a step in the right direction

[CheesyPeteza]

Atleast its finally showing a government willing to do something about it. You can't just educate people overnight to become IT experts and never get fooled again by some auto dialer. There will always be people who don't understand the system they are using. Education isn't a complete solution, the telephone regulators have to step in and do something. I would actually like to see a ban on the extreme premium rate calls completely (the ones that charge about 1000% the price of the call), but still allow the double the cost ones for TV programmes to make money in their competitions/polls like who wants to be a millionaire etc.

make such scam billing illegal

[frovingslosh]

So why not pass a law against any "automatic" payments on a telephone bill going outside the country? The end user shouldn't be responsible for this type of fraud at all, and if the telcos had to resolve any such charges themselves rather than making their cut when the end user was hijacked and scammed, you can bet they would be more motivated to clean up the system as well.

Of course, you might still need to block some popular scam countries, if only to protect the citizens from running up not insignificant long distance time charges (and you certainly can't stop the telcos from charging from long distance time, but you can stop them from charging the extra fees that motivate this problem in the first place). If enough countries got around to saying flat out that we know this is a scam and we are going to legally protect our citizens from the "fees" they are being scammed out of, then eventually the problem would go away and there would be no need to block numbers. But as long as the government sides with the crooks and their telco accomplices and allows the telcos to go after the victim in this scam, the problem will not only continue but will grow; this article is the proof of that.

What little, if any, valid charges one incurrs while calling another party by long distance could certainly be covered by other and better means than allowing it to be directly billed to a telephone number (credit card, for example). Enforcing this would be far better than exposing all of your citizens to a scam based on a flawed telco business model and blocking whole countries from your long distance system.

Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing this type of billing go away completely, even for calls within a country. But at least there is a good argument that any scammers operating this way inside a country can be caught and taken to court; which is often not the case when they are on the other side of the globe. A few simple changes to the law, such as forcing the telcos to hold any payments for several innitial months to be sure victims have time to complain about scam sites and block those payments, should be adequate to stop hit and run scammers from seting up shop in the country they plan to run their scam in. And, of course, a law should block incoming international long distance telco "special fees", not just outgoing ones.

Eircom was making more out of it than the scammers

[blorg]

Eircom (Ireland's effective telecom monopoly) had picked the dialler countries out specifically and put them in a special 'Band 13' that was more expensive than anywhere else on the planet - 360.58c per minute, *three times* the next most expensive region. However these same countries could be dialled from for example Germany for as little as 37c/minute.

So likely Eircom were paying the foreign telco a relatively small amount for completing the call, and the foreign telco would pass on a percentage of that to the dialler operator, while Eircom itself was getting the lions share of the actual call costs. If you complained, they would basically say 'you shouldn't have been visiting porn sites then'.

It was in no way in Eircom's interest to see these scams ended, and that's why it was the government regulator that stepped in to force them to block the number.

See here for some more background information. (This guy's site is a parody of the ComReg site but the information he presents is true.)

Re:Will this ever work

[frovingslosh]

If America did the same* then they properly would.. :)

*NEVER gona happen

On the other hand, if America (and maybe the E.U. too) passed a simple law stating that customers would not be responsiable for international long distance premium charges and that the government would no longer side with the telcos in giving them the weight of law to enforce these fees coming from a flawed business model against it's own citizens, then the problem would go away fast.

It might even go away faster if the government recognized that this was a well know fraud based on a flawed concept that the telcos set up and that the telcos take a cut from each time the scam gets a victim, and charged them with rackettering for letting the problem continue.