Phone hackers dial and redial to steal billions

Bob Foreman's architecture firm ran up a $166,000 phone bill in a single weekend last March. But neither Foreman nor anyone else at his seven-person company was in the office at the time. "I thought: 'This is crazy. It must be a mistake'," Foreman said. It wasn't.

Hackers had broken into the phone network of the company, Foreman Seeley Fountain Architecture, and routed $166,000 worth of calls from the firm to premium-rate telephone numbers in Gambia, Somalia and the Maldives. It would have taken 34 years for the firm to run up those charges legitimately, according to a complaint it filed with the Federal Communications Commission.

The firm, in Norcross, Georgia, was the victim of an age-old fraud that has found new life now that most corporate phone lines run over the internet. The swindle, which on the web is easier to pull off and more profitable, affects mostly small businesses and cost victims $4.73 billion globally last year. That is up nearly $1 billion from 2011, according to the Communications Fraud Control Association. Major carriers have sophisticated fraud systems in place to catch hackers before they run up false six-figure charges.

But small businesses often use local carriers, which lack such anti-fraud systems. And some of those carriers are leaving customers to foot the bill.

The scheme works this way, telecommunications fraud experts say: Hackers sign up to lease premium-rate phone numbers, often used for sexual-chat or psychic lines, from one of dozens of web-based services that charge dialers over $1 a minute and give the lessee a cut. In the US, premium-rate numbers are easily identified by 1-900 prefixes, and callers are informed they will be charged higher rates.

But elsewhere, like in Latvia and Estonia, they can be trickier to spot. The payout to the lessees can be as high as 24 cents for every minute spent on the phone. Hackers then break into a business's phone system and make calls through it to their premium number, typically over a weekend, when nobody is there to notice. With high-speed computers, they can make hundreds of calls simultaneously, forwarding as many as 220 minutes' worth of phone calls a minute to the pay line. The hacker gets a cut of the charges, delivered through a Western Union, MoneyGram or wire transfer.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/followceleb.cms?alias=Phone hackers,Hackers,Foreman Seeley,Communications Fraud Control Association

Stay updated on the go with The Times of India's mobile apps. Click here to download it for your device.

Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang

Phone hackers dial and redial to steal billions

Dengan url

http://pijitsehat.blogspot.com/2014/10/phone-hackers-dial-and-redial-to-steal.html

Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya

Phone hackers dial and redial to steal billions

namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link

Phone hackers dial and redial to steal billions

sebagai sumbernya