Carlos, On 01/26/2011 06:20 PM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:
1. What is the scam here? The recipient of those calls doesn't gain anything, and placing a few calls to three specific satellite phones seems to have little purpose. Many of the calls were concurrent. It all happened in the span of just a few hours.
In my experience, generally speaking the scam is contingent on the party that's doing the hacking being involved on both sides. They initiate the calls, but they are also in bed with whoever is taking the calls (or is a high-margin intermediary in completing the calls, depending on the cost structure of that particular destination and infrastructure). Therefore, they get some non-trivial percentage of the charges kicked back to them in some fashion or another. This is not an uncommon occurrence with telcos that run premium numbers or some special rural tariffs in other countries. It's rather akin to rural ILEC access charge arbitrage / traffic pumping schemes in the US, in the sense that someone either shows up at the telco's door purporting to offer some sort of "free" service or "novel" business model that seeks profit sharing in the access revenue to make it work, or, for the more ballsy ones, dispense with any such pretense and simply conspire with the telco to game some calls in with false answer supervision or other blatant tomfoolery in return for a cut of the toll action. The difference is that with costs in the several dollars/minute, there's just a lot more money to be made in other jurisdictions, not fractions of pennies. -- Alex -- Alex Balashov - Principal Evariste Systems LLC 260 Peachtree Street NW Suite 2200 Atlanta, GA 30303 Tel: +1-678-954-0670 Fax: +1-404-961-1892 Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/