Hoax charges for overseas internet usage!

[mar122999]

Hi. I have a friend that just recieved a $315 phone bill. He called the operater and she told him that he may have clicked on a pop-up ad button and by doing that, it connected him with somebody in Africa. I have never heard of this and I'm am not really sure what to tell him. The phone company dropped the charges, but she told him that next time he will have to pay. He is clean on spyware and adware, viruses, ..etc. Has anybody ever heard of anything like this or could anyone come up with some solutions on what could have happened? Thanks.

[originel]

yeah i have heard of this, they've been around for a long time...they are almost always installed by clicking a link you shouldn't click online

[mar122999]

Bump

[dr_roberts49]

This seems VERY illegal to me. Why should we even have to worry about such schemes? The big phone companies should put THEIR resources to work in preventing this from happening. Then again, they make money from it. I think I just answered my own question.

Robert

[mar122999]

It sure does. Spyware and Adware is OK to an extent, but when companies/people sneak in an find ways to legally charge you money by tricking you, something needs to happen. My suggestion would be a good virus program with updates, firewall such as Zone Alarm, Adware to protect against Spyware/Adware, and some good common sense when it comes to internet browsing. And most important: NO MORE REFLEXIVE CLICKING!

[elroy]

I live in a small rural town with a little privately owned phone company that doubles as the local ISP. They told me they have blocked all calls to 3 different countries because of this type of scam. The scam often involves downloading a short porno film clip and when you try to run it you have to click on a link that transfers your dial-up connection to a call to Africa or ?? without your knowledge.

The phone company didn't block certain customers from calling these countries, they blocked ALL OF THEIR CUSTOMERS from calling these 3 countries. This company only has around 600 customers so there isn't a lot of demand to place calls to Africa.

[mar122999]

That is what the phone company did with my friend. They blocked them from making calls to foriegn countries.

[mar122999]

I believe I found the solution on how/why this happens. I was browsing around with hijackthis on my system and I asked to see an explanation of the file "O16". This is what it gave me for this type of file:

The downloaded files (DPF) folder in your Windows base folder holds various types of programs that were
downloaded from the internet. These programs are loaded whenver IE is active. Legitimate examples are the
Java VM, Microsoft XML Parser, and the Google toolbar.

Unfortunately, due to the lack security of IE, malicious sites let IE automatically download porn dialers,
bogus plugins, AciveX objects, ...etc. to this folder, which will haunt you with popups, huge phone bills,
random crashes, browser hijackings and whatnot.

[extreme_gamer]

the only better reason to get a permanent internet connection, isn't it? no more beeps and a lot more speed.

[mar122999]

As far as a permanent connection goes on the dial-up issues, I don't know how that would work. But you can still download bogus plugins and/or ActiveX junk objects with a permanent connection. I am pretty sure that a permanent connection is still not entirely safe from issues such as these and probably never will be totally safe.