Ireland cuts phone lines to stop scams
Irish telcos were refusing to refund bills of up to $22 000 run up by unsuspecting computer users who had loaded trojan dialer programs to their computers and ended up routing their internet surfing via places such as Tuvalu, Diego Garcia and Mauritania for prices of up to $7.50 a minute. Now the government has stepped in and cut off direct-dialed calls to entire nations, in order to stop internet-based fraud.
Calls to 13 locations world wide will now have to be routed by operators who will check that the calls are being placed to humans, rather than to modems. Legitimate numbers will be placed on a white-list which will then allow further calls to be direct-dialed.
Could this result in a game of cat and mouse – I wonder how long it will take before the white-listed numbers get reconfigured by the fraudsters to route through to the money-making computer connections?