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Cell Phone CEOs Marked For Phone Cloning
Saint Aardvark writes "When Sarah Drummond got back from Israel, she found a cell phone bill
for more
than $12,000. She contacted her
cell phone provider to let them know that someone had stolen her
phone, but they weren't interested in helping her and told her she'd
have to pay. In preparing for small claims court, she and her partner
found out that not only does her company have the ability to spot
unusual activity on a cell phone account, the company executives' own phones have
been targeted by a group linked to Hezbollah. From the article: 'They were
using actually a pretty brilliant psychology. Nobody wants to cut off
[CEO] Ted Rogers' phone or any people that are directly under Ted
Rogers, so they took their scanners to our building, like our north
building, where our senior top, top, top executives are. They took
their scanners there and also to Yorkville, where there are a lot of
high rollers and like it would be a major PR blunder to shoot first
and ask questions later. . . . Nobody wants to shut off Ted. Even if
he is calling Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and Kuwait.'"
Ya, like it would be a major blunder dude, if we had to do our jobs man. Yo man, pass the bowl man.
cel phone
I'm a Rogers Wireless Customer (no, I won't tell you my phone number :P) and it's a scary thought to see that if somebody stole my phone and ran up a $12 000 bill, they would expect me to pay it.
But what really makes me wonder is why they didn't stop to ask somebody! Sure, you don't want to cut off Ted Rogers' phone, but if you told him about it and said "this is unusual activity in your account - are you sure it's not fraud?" it would probably have been a good idea. Credit card companies (that I can recall) do just that.
Join the Empire! http://www.empirereborn.net/
As title.
So, in essence, this Rogers company is aiding and abetting terrorist groups by forcing their customers to sponsor cell phone usage by those groups.
Sounds like just the sort of thing the USA PATRIOT Act was meant to stop, but somehow I doubt that the FBI is going to step in.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
My recommendation (IANAL): Take the settlement. The court fees will probably be more than the settlement!
I don't find the fact of who they're targetting, or the fact that they're cloning phones, all that shocking. I do, however, find it a bit fishy that these same (big) people have been _repeatedly_ targetted, and it has been noticed several times. You'd think that some sort of measure would have been put into place by now to at least curb the effectiveness of this tactic when used on these same people. I mean, after the first time my phone got cloned, I think I'd pass word down to the grunts to block calls to certain countries from that phone, as long as there wasn't a high "real" call volume there.
At any rate, after this being done several times, you'd think they would have some checks in place, but hey...when you own your own huge company, I guess paying your own bills isn't really an issue.
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
Nice try, but we here at Slashdot are adamantly opposed to ANYTHING that might hinder terrorist activities.
Tough titty for you and the folks that get killed; we have a duty to oppose the United States in general, and the Bush administration in particular.
Wasn't Iran bundling a year of free phone service with every missle purchased?
Could somebody explain what does this mean? What is involved in cloning, and how does it work?
Where does the "terror" group come in? What are they trying to do here, and why is it a "terror group" if they aren't uh, terrorizing anybody?
And most importantly, what is the point of making some random person pay for a CEO's phone usage? Is it an attack against the CEO, her, or just intended to create problems for Rogers?
You should be able to set upper limits for your cell phone expenses, plus have people call you back if there is unusual activity.
Credit card companies do this for credit cards and it works fine. There is no reason not to do it for cell phones, other than that cell phone companies hope you'll run up lots of charges. The reason why they hope you do that is because, unlike credit card charges, cell phone charges are not real money. That is, if you complain about your $10000 cell phone bill, it costs them little to "forgive" it, whereas a $10000 credit card bill is real money.
You mean that people are cloning CEO's Check Engine Lights, turning them to the on position, and then accosting them for their money at sleezy automechanic stores? Well, you spelled it that way thrice.
Promote freedom; fight fascism.
Here's a simple solution... don't pay your bill! Just because you receive an invoice from a company, it does not mean that you need to pay it. If you want to dispute the charge, switch providers and let things run their course.
Now some people worry about their credit ratings... well up here in Canada, our credit bureaus are private corporations with very little responsibility to anyone and in fact there are only two. The credibility of the credit system in this country is weak at best. For example, if I decide to invoice each and everyone of you, and do not receive payment, I simply send this information to the credit bureau and a black mark is added to your record. You will NOT be notified, and likely won't discover this until you need to apply for credit. When you discover this blackmark, your only recourse is to have a note amended to your file to explain the accusation. Unfortunately this does little, if anything at all.
That's why, for any significant purchases (i.e. a mortgage on a home, or large car loan) creditors look to our income to debt ration first, and weigh that heaviest.
Long story short: don't pay the bill, and in a few years when it finally reaches court (after the company makes several attempts to settle for significantly less), explain your situation and countersue for court fees.
That's unfair, the people that exploited the women are gonna get away with it!
At least she get's compensated, but when are these companies ever gonna stop this sort of thing from happening due to tightening security and so forth... well, I suppose never because no ones ever truly up to date with security.
Hey - lets do some biz. I'll pad the invoices for $20K and then offer to settle for $2K. This way you can feel oh so good as I shake you down for $2000 bux.
The jerks just love people like you. Over time they figure out where the highbar is and cheat and steal just below this level. Most people will pay rather than fight. I suppose traffic tickets fall into this area as well. But then that is instutionalized right?
Well the reason credit ratings are important is they can.
B K12
Prevent you from getting credit, this includes such thing as electric service without substantial deposits.
It could prevent you from getting the loan, or a good rate on a car or mortgage.
You might not get an apartment if you are unable to pay.
Or a job
It could raise your insurance rates.
Quite simply poor credit is a black mark that could affect much of how you live your life.
As for disputing, they have to correct all wrong information upon being informed it's long.
http://www.canlaw.com/credit/creditreportlaw.htm#
Simply ignoring it and hoping it will go away is naive and dumb.
She teaches law, at one of the most prestigious law schools in Canada. I'm sure she can prosecute her case in small claims court, where she filed it.
Ad nausea, I work for a large cell carrier.
I investigate these types of charges on a weekly basis. And when something like this happens, we investigate and write off all the charges no problem.
I am sure her phone was stolen. But where was it stolen from? Her house? Her car?
Note the article said her phone was STOLEN, not cloned, two very different actions.
More than likely she had it with her. It was stolen and she did not notice it gone. And when she got home she had a huge phone bill.
If the phone was stolen in her home country, she could have filed a police report, showed it to rogers and they would have written it off.
If the phone was stolen overseas, when she noticed it gone, should have immediately called and reported in.
As someone who travels internationally, I tend to keep the phone with me on trips. Most people do. The article is very light on these details.
If it was a GSM phone they generally need access to the phone and have to grab and clone the sim. So physical access is needed for the device.
The article mentions that the owners of rogers got scanned and cloned. When was it, soounds like they used TDMA phones, which was probably a few years back when it happened.
Rogers is GSM and I would imagine the pres and his execs would have using gsm for at least 2 if not three years for now.
I googled for info on this and could not find any article about the CEO of rogers being cloned.
A lot of times the maids in hotles, cruise ships, will use the customers phones when they are not around. That is why if you leave a phone in a room that is not your own, lock it, hide the sim. Battery in a different place. Little personal responsibility.
So I think before we pass judgment we should get the rest of the story.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I know it's a minor nit, but you'd think that when you're actually talking with the press you could say something more intelligent than "I was all like totally surprised".
.. that had been considering a switch to Rogers, but after reading this story, I will never consider them again. I imagine there are probably 10 other people just like me, that will decide not to buy from Rogers in the future. If you take even ten 2 year contracts billed at $50/month, you are already at $12,000 in revenue.
The bad publicity that Rogers is getting from this, will surely be much more expensive than if they were to simply write off the bill. And trying to settle for $2000? If they are willing to let go of $10,000 why not let it go of the last $2000, and save themselves a few customers.
Firstly, Rogers appears to be running a GSM network, so cloning the phone means NOTHING WHATSOEVER and is actually quite unnecessary -- any 'ol GSM phone will work.
What you need to clone is the SIM - the little chip that is associated with your number. Stick it in any GSM phone (more or less) and off you go, you have that subscriber's identity.
While it is possible to clone a SIM, you need access to the SIM and a smart card reader for several hours to crack the encryption. (At least in the earlier SIMs, they may have improved the situation since, I hope so.) This isn't a matter of reading an identification number off, you need to read off the private key from the SIM - something that was supposed to be imposssible but there are weaknesses in certain versions of the encyption algorithm.)
Anyway, this particular case is not about SIM cloning, merely boring old cellphone being stolen. (It's admitted as such when the article states, "Ms. Drummond quickly determined what had happened: Someone had stolen her phone while she was away. She called Rogers Wireless, which told her there was nothing it could do, and she would have to pay the entire amount".)
The whole misleading piece about phone cloneing is mostly sensational journalism - it seems some employees claimed that some terrorist groups cloned the CEO of the cellphone's company's cellphone. (And remember that the person at the centre of the story - one Ms Drummond - merely had her phone stolen, a much more boring case.)
Anyway, Ms Drummond failed to notify her cellphone provider that her cellphone was stolen and then complained that the theif used it. The fraud detection system didn't detect it and it seems she therefore argues that it's not her fault. Even though I'd guess the cellphone company doesn't owe you anything when it comes to detecting fraudlant use of your phone.
Moral of the story: As soon as you know your SIM is stolen, CONTACT YOUR CELLPHONE COMPANY! They can block outgoing calls on it saving you a lot of money.
(GSM cellphone companies can also block phone IMEI's - stopping a theif from using that phone in the future - but only do this once the phone is known stolen as it's a real pain to get that undone.)
If her phone/SIM had been cloned, then yes, the cellphone company would have an issue on its hands. As it is, all that's happened is silly girl didn't report a stolen phone. Happens all the time, nothing to see here, move along.
Oh, and it's easy for a cellphone company to transfer a number to a new SIM.
Why have the cell phone companies not encrypted the communications which make it easy to scan for the codes needed to clone phones? OK, that is a silly question, it would cost them more money to implement than the fraud that it allows. Besides, they probably get a significant number of customers to just pay the fraudulent charges. Which means it is not impactinig the companies bottom line. And what are few pissed off customers? Even if customers change services there is enough churn between cell providers that there is little if any net loss of customers/revenue.
This sounds like another case of an industry that has determined there is little or no upside of doing the right thing. It would seem that implementing public/private key scheme could be used to elminate cloning of phones. But unless the cell phone companies determine that including such a feature will increase their profits it won't be done.
First, she said her phone was "stolen", then she said Ted Rogers' phone was "cloned" by a group.
...
...
...
Also, she was on a trip to "Israel", and the "group" has "links to" Hezbollah.
Then the article says that Rogers Co. knew that Ted's phone was cloned
That alleged group is not named, nor what the "links" are.
Makes for a great headline though: "How a terror group cloned Ted Rogers' cellphone"
She is not a high ranking exec, just an academic, so why did the pattern of her calls not trigger a service stoppage for her?
Her husband is a "technology journalist", and this is published in Globe Technology
I am not sure if the article got mangled in editing or it was incoherent to start with. The BS meter reading just shot up
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Grammar nazis need to be extra-careful when posting :)
Isn't that just a great mental image?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Living under communism for 50 years might have something to do with it.
Ted Rogers? In a heartbeat! Let him go through his own crummy "customer service" to get reconnected.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
She lost her phone, maybe didn't notice, somebody used it and now she's facing a huge bill she doesn't want to pay. So how to weasel out of it? Just do what all good North Americans do when they're trying to avoid responsibility for something: blame "the terrorists". The ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card.
Really, so now Hezbollah has activities that are outside of Lebanon? As a Christian Lebanese citizen, I find this somewhat shocking. I should be the last one to try and protect Hezbollah, but it's just unfair when I see them mentioned in articles as a "terrorist" group, in the same way Al-Qaeda. Hezbollah has always been, and is limited to the Lebanese territory... now what the boundaries of those territories are is up to discussion, but I don't think they'd be involved in international activities such as this, since they get most of their support from Syria/Iran.
I sometimes wonder if this kind of "oversight" is not sometimes done on purpose...
cloning is referring to the SID of the phone.
You take the System ID of one phone (akin to a MAC address on a nic)
and then reprogram your phone to have this SID.
That essentially makes your phone, their phone.
Was much more popular when all networks were Analog (as it was trivial to capture traffic). Never a problem in my area, but when I would go through Chicago or any major city it certainly was.
Digital is not perfect, but even without using encryption it is much harder to crack than analog service.
But you can also get SIDs without snooping for them (but if you 'travelled to a foreign land and then mysteriously used..') it points to using unsafe towers or one whose tower operators had monitoring mode on. You can then program your phone through softcodes using the keypad or alternatively program a bunch of SIM cards and then those are deployed.
One thing to do to secure yourself against that is to make sure your tri-mode phone doesn't fall back to analog if that is all that is available. And don't leave your phone unattended.
and it was like, a really good paper too...
seems to have worked for them.
Could we use massive presidential phone bills as an excuse to fire Bush?
:P so why not?
Just think of 696969-HORNY-CATHOLIC-NUNS...
If I remember right, the previous president was taken to court for using 7777-PIZZA-GRL...
Idiot's guide to taking presidents into a court in current US:
1.Clone While House's mobile phone ids.
2.Dial to your favorite $700/min numbers.
4.Make sure your buddy in the telecom company promises to leak this month's phone bills to non-fox-news alike press.
5.In a few hours from having the uncrypted email conversation with your buddy, prepare to pulled into a black unknown car in the middle of day, next find your head flushed into a toilet in some foreign country while your blood is filled with interragation chemicals and your anus with some sadistic joke. if you're lucky, a couple of poor iraqi farmers and your buddy will be making company to your underground cage, while your family is crying how you died in 'an accident'.
6.?
7.PROFIT!!!
Yes, the phone does transmit some identifying information once authorised - but identification is not authentication!
To authenticate and authorise the phone/SIM pair to the network, the phone is just a go-between, shuttling information from over-the-air to the SIM and back again. (In case you're not aware, the SIM is a physical chip. In the old days, it was a smart card; these days it's just the chip of a smart card on a piece of plastic just a little larger than the chip.)
The network sends an unique challange to the SIM (via the phone) and the SIM has to respond approproately using shared-secrets and techniques not too dissimilar from private-key / public-key cryptography. Replaying this is of no value to you because next time you want to authenticate, the challange will be different! (And I believe the Network is also authenticated to the SIM as well - I don't know the details that well).
The theory is that the shared secret (Ki) is never transmitted over the air - it's known to the network and to your SIM and that is all - it was designed to it was impossible to retreive it directly from the SIM.
It is an active process involving bidirectional communication, not a passive "this is my number".
Terrorists are terrorists, no matter their scope.
-bZj
.sig
A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step -- and so it was that law professor Susan Drummond's long, strange trip into the world of wireless security, where she learned that a terrorist organization had appropriated Ted Rogers' cellphone number, was launched by the arrival of a phone bill for $12,237.60.
Okay, thanks for introducing Ms. Drummond. Who the hell is Ted Rogers and what did that have to do with Ms. Drummonds number being cloned. I don't think they did a very good job of explaining that. I read the article twice and still have no idea who Ted Rogers is.
"They were cloning the senior executives repeatedly, because everyone was afraid to cut off Ted Rogers' phone,"
Uh.. okay, well.. why didn't they do it to Ms. Drummond's phone either? Crappy article.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
If you're the kind of successful person who happens to be a CEO or near-CEO that is targetted for a phone issue, you probably have many other things giving you a good credit rating: wicked income, stuff that can be sold (cars, houses, etc) for money, and other forms of credit (credit cards, for example).
There's a 7-year timeout on a bad credit mark. I'd sure as hell do it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Ok, suppose it was stolen. Now how long does it take to figure out that it is stolen? An average person uses their phone several times a day, I assume.
So, where could you possibly call to produce $12000 bill? Even if it were $5/minute, that's still 2400 minutes = 40 hours OF NON-STOP TALKING!!!
T-Mobile Prepaid. 10 cents/minute if you spend $100. Fewer tricks than other companies. Your time extends to a new year if you spend $10 before the end of the first year, I was told.
Moral of the story: As soon as you know your SIM is stolen, CONTACT YOUR CELLPHONE COMPANY ... As it is, all that's happened is silly girl didn't report a stolen phone.
I know reading the article is frowned upon here and all, but it does kind of point out that the woman had been out of the country for a month and returned to find a huge phone bill. In the course of investigating what happened, she was told that her company did have pattern matching/potential abuse detection software deployed but ignores the results. The "silly girl" is an edge case due to the length of her being out of the country, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for the phone company. They chose to ignore what was 99.999% an abusive situation either to profit or out of complete cluelessness. Neither case gets a whole lot of sympathy from me. Here's a basic algorithm:
If an account's monthly balance >= 3*Average of 3 previous month's total charges, chances are something is wrong. Of course, you have to add checks for a new account, but that's not that much more difficult.
a Jackass. More importantly, he is CEO(or president or both) of Rogers Communications/Wireless which is the cell phone provider which handed Ms.Drummond the $12k bill
So you're basically saying that the Jews are some sort of "super race" of people whom we should worship? Somehow if a Jewish person didn't invent it first, it wouldn't have been invented ever? As if there aren't other non-Jews in the world who have contributed greately to the same fields? Your summary of Jewish led efforts in computer security is very grossly overstated, too.
Jesus christ, people make some ridiculous statements on Slashdot.
If you are going to use the term "anti semite" correctly, at least don't use it in such a way that trivilizes non-Jewish semites (i.e. Arabs) because you somehow think when someone is attacking Jews that they are attacking ALL SEMITES. I always love it when a Jew calls an Arab an anti-semite when Arabs ARE semetic people!
However, it is a known fact that Jews, by their own holy books, view non-Jews as being less than human. That sort of summarizes the attitude of many Jews, unfortunately. At least the Jews I met didn't have this retarded sense of jewish supremacy like you do - they have some presepctive on life and other people.
Aiming at their calls to (!Terrorist!) countries is just trying to get back to them. Focus instead on the real problem, of Rogers overcharging people.
In our case, they added 10-20$ CAD to our Internet bill. We complained, they apologized and removed the additional amount. Next month we again saw additional charges. In total they overcharged us 3 times. Since we cant audit monthly bills, we switched to Bell (another hated ISP for various reasons). I've since warned every Rogers customers to check their bills regularly... they play dirty.
But I wont go ahead and link them to Osama bin Laden anytime soon. That takes the focus away from the real problem.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Not when it is read by its intended audience ...
I've travelled extensively overseas, including the Middle East. Arabs were never anything but nice to me, even though I'd heard all the horror stories (and I'm inclined to suspect those _were_ just stories).
Once in Jordan I left a hostel and was driving south when a dilapidated old car came roaring up behind me, flashing its one working headlight. Naturally I was scared shitless, suspecting I was about to be kidnapped or robbed, but it turned out that I'd left my wallet behind and they returned it to me.
Now let me tell you about New Zealand. I have been there many times too, mainly because I have a strong interest in sailplanes, and NZ is a world center for sailplane flying, but also just because I love the place so much. It is amazingly beautiful and the people are the friendliest anywhere.
NZ is now very popular with Israelis. They see it as a safe destination, and it is. But many hostels and back-packer places in NZ are refusing to accept Israeli tourists now, because of their appalling behavior.
For instance, it's long been a tradition in NZ to mark your food and leave it in the hostel kitchen, where it used to remain unmolested. Unfortunately Israelis seem to think that people who do that are suckers and deserve to have their stuff stolen.
Besides their dishonesty, they are also rude, arrogant and inconsiderate: don't count on getting any sleep, because Israeli tourists think nothing of, say, very noisily playing pool all night, completely ignoring the wishes of other guests.
New Zealand is not anti-Semitic, but if Israelis continue to behave they way they do it could quickly become so, and as a Jewish American I would be heart-broken.
The summary calls her Sarah, the article calls her Susan...
A few mistakes in a summary is to be expected here, but at least get the name right...
Yet!
I did not request a proofreader. You've added no value to this discussion. This is a chat forum, not a national newspaper or scientific document. The grammar was incorrect because I did not review what I wrote, yet there was still a useful discussion in progress. Comments like this don't make me a better writer, they just make me not want to bother participating.
So if someone can't find their cell phone, how long should they look for it before reporting it stolen?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
TFA is almost as bad as the /. entry. I kept thinking her company (as in, the company she worked for or owned) had the ability to monitor her cell phone usage and that her company's executives were targeted by Hezbollah.
"Who does she frickin' work for?" I kept asking myself. "And who's this Ted Rogers clown?"
Also, read the first sentence of the article and tell me this guy doesn't need to get hit with the journalism stick.
-- sig this
Ya, I thought about putting a "yet" in my comment too.
otherwise you would have had first hand experiences with cheaters and thieves.
i actually typoed that as "lies" originally... ironically it might just fit... anyways:
Jan Innes, a vice-president with Rogers Communications, confirmed that the company has an automatic fraud-detection system that flags suspicious calling patterns, but refused to say how it works. "We do not give out information that might help people get around the system," she said.
Translation: "Our system is not fool-proof, and we are aware it can be exploited, but are doing nothing to prevent it. We are instead crossing our fingers with the obscure hope that out of our thousands or millions of users, not one will stumble across an exploit. Security through obscurity!"
Thanks Rogers, I'll be sure to avoid you guys like the plague if I ever get a cell phone.
Hezbollah may not have the world-wide scope of Al-Qaeda, but their activities certainly do extend outside of Lebanon: they have repeatedly attacked Israel. Since Hezbollah routinely attacks civilian targets in Israel (farmers working in their fields, villages) they are a terrorist group.
I posted this on my blog somewhile back: http://www.krunk4ever.com/blog/?p=56
What Grinds My Gears: I've probably made this rant before, but I really really hate the help cell phone service providers provide when you lose your phone. In other words, NO HELP. A friend recently lost his cell phone and it irked me since the T-Mobile was giving him the same bullshit they gave me. Once again, I could never see WHY they wouldn't help us track the phone or help the law enforcement track down the thief? What more easier way is there when a thief is carrying a tracking device!?!?! There should be a list of all reported stolen phones and when someone tries to make a call from that phone, it'll try to locate the person through triangulation and notify the nearest police department to that area (which is easily doable since 911 works on a cell phone). Another service easily providable is any call made from that phone no matter what # was dialed (besides emergency #s like 911) will be forwarded to 1 particular # which the own can set. I mean in the event where the owner loses the phone and the person who found the phone wants to return it, he'd probably try to call someone on that list and ask if they knew who owned this #. By being able to forward all calls to say your home line, you won't have to worry about long distance charges and you can be certain if they try to make a call, it'll be forwarded to you. Another extremely stupid idea is that when you lose your phone is that they recommend that you suspend your account to prevent the thief from putting charges on your bill. However if you're under contract, suspending your account VIOLATES the contract and you're forced to pay the cancellation fee. Which really only leaves you instead of suspending the account to immediately purchase a new phone and swap it onto the current plan. I've asked before if it was okay to suspend the account, but continue paying for the service until I could get a new phone. They apologize and said they couldn't do that. OH MY GOSH! I'm willing to pay for a service which I WILL NOT BE USING, but instead they make it harder on the customer and force them to either get a new phone immediate or suspend the service and pay the cancellation fee.
HD Trailers
In all honesty...How the hell could Rogers miss out on $12,000 worth of phone calls. I'm fairly certain that in their entire customer database only a few customers could actually produce this kind of traffic. If Rogers thinks a judge will let them bilk one woman for making $12,000 worth of phone calls I think common sense will kick in.
Hezbollah is known to be active in North Carolina (since when was the United States mainland considered part of Lebanese territory?):
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Hehe, judging by how many companies fail and get taken over, it most likely wont exist
any more.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
"Firstly, Rogers appears to be running a GSM network [...]"
7 /rogers051217.html , the cloning happened in 1997, when Rogers was using analogue phones; here's the relevant quote:
But, according to http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2005/12/1
"Rogers admits its top executives were victims of a security breach, but that was back in 1997, when they used analogue phones."
If you're going to diss a journalist for lack of research, at least do some research yourself.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
At the end of the article, they mention that the company offered to settle for $2,000. That's a LOT better than $14,000+ she'd have to pay if she loses (with interest). I gotta admit she's got guts going up against them, but I think her case is pretty shaky.
Actually, you've got it backwards. $12,000 would have been MUCH cheaper for Rogers to pay than what has already happened to them. This story was on the front page of the Saturday Globe and Mail, the number 1 Canadian national news paper. The story then continued across two pages inside the front section. It would be hard to imagine worse coverage than that, especially right before Christmas when people are buying new phones as gifts.
Another important point to keep in mind is that the person in the story is a law professor. While the interest may be racking up the court proceedings aren't costing her a thing and she's more than exacted revenge on Rogers through the publicity this has generated. I'd say the company has no option left but to cover the bill ASAP and hope that they can some how spin this as a mistake while hoping similar victims don't start talking to each other.
I had the most wonderful laugh when I first read this in the paper, and that's before it occurred to me that Rogers has as much as admitted to knowingly aiding a terrorist organisation. Most Canadians already hate Rogers from their massively unpopular reverse billing faux pas a few years back so there's no love lost and people will be laughing about this one for a while to come.
See, this annoys me. Because by this same rationale, all those people going around raising money for the IRA in New England are also members of a terrorist organisation. But you'll never hear anyone claiming that the IRA is alive and well in Boston... For some reason, they're just "sympathisers" and "Irish patriots".
I had a BROKEN Phone stolen out of my car. I did not know this until after I got my bill for $500.00. (I had never used more than 100 minutes in my life). I called the police and the phone company who charged me for the time, even though it was stolen service from them. I changed phone providers, had to pay the $500 and the cancellation fee. When I moved my phone number I recieved a call from the thief's LAWYER that the thief had a court date. His girlfriend called me, and I left him a voice mail for him to call me. I found out that my phone had been confiscated by the police, I had the guy's name and number, he told me he repaired the phone. I even found the police officer that had confiscated the phone in an unrelated drug case.
The gist of it was the police refused to investigate. Refused to press charges, and refused to do anything else other than take a report, and Sprint STILL charged me.
I HATE SPRINT, and will hate any other cell service that does me as bad. Next year, after this contract, I move to prepaid minutes and no more contracts.
Among other things, more people have sympathy for the IRA than for Hez: people who are pro-hezbollah and/or anti-jew don't call the fundraisers members of a terrorist organization either - they too would be "sympathisers" and "* patriots"
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
First of all, I have personally sat through many a phonecall with a co-worker who had his billing repeatedly screwed up by his phone company (Bell Canada). He meticulously went over the phone details every month, and quite often found several invalid charges for calls that were during his free time, or to his wife's "companion phone", etc. Hours on the phone each month were required to correct this, each month.
Now my question is, what happens if the cell phone company threw in an extra minute here, an extra minute there. Perhaps a phone call or two to a number you often call, or a random number in general.
How do you know, and if you were meticulous enough to know you're being screwed with... how could you prove it wasn't an error (whether intentional or otherwise) on behalf of the phone company?
It's my understanding that she didn't bother to call in and report her phone stolen until later.
The cloning issues were from 1998, when they used TDMA/Analog technologies, not GSM.
It's really quite simple. She didn't make the charges. She's not responsible for them. There's no arguement that says otherwise. Lets say you steal my car, hit a couple of mail boxes, whack a Mercedes or two, and rob half a dozen gas stations with my car. Am I liable. Hell no I'm not liable. I didn't commit the crime. Someone stole my property. She's not responsible. This has been argued many times and quite frankly it's getting old. This isn't news.
Yes, I hope they get those American terrorists out of Iraq
The problem is that you don't see this abuse until you get the bill.
/making/ money from the abuse. I mean, it's not that hard to get in touch with the user if you spot unusual patterns of usage - you know the number to call ...
I'm left wondering why it's so hard for providers to run checks on unusual activites like the credit cards do. Oh, sorry, easy answer: it costs money instead of
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