New phone-card scam - ‘lost’ pre-paid calling cards : Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

"There's no magic formula that says A plus C equals X" - Terry Venables (source:Colemanballs, Private Eye)

New phone-card scam - ‘lost’ pre-paid calling cards

23rd July 2004 by Simon

There are just so many phone frauds going on these days it’s really hard to keep up, Internet diallers that replace you ISP’s number with a premium rate number; brief calls to your mobile that charge you a fortune when you call them back; the list goes on and on.

In the old days the frauds were mainly directed against the phone companies. Back fifteen-ish years ago, a friend who was living in LA used to find it very expensive to call back to the UK. So when he felt the urge to chat to his mates, he’d wander to the Venice Beach area and within a short period of time a shady character would saunter up offering to sell him a Magic Number.

This Magic Number would allow him to call any number he liked, worldwide, for nothing more than the dodgy bod charged for it. It was a bit of a gamble as it wasn’t known how long this Magic Number would last. Sometimes it would be a day or two or if he was lucky, a weeks.

These days the frauds are perpetrated against individuals. Another friend was telling me today of a foreign friend who was stay at his house got was very excited when they found a phone calling card on the street. On getting back to his house she decided to test it with a call back home and nattered on for an hour or so, feeling very pleased with herself.

It’s only now, when my friend’s phone bill arrives does he discover that the number printed on the ‘lost’ calling card was a premium rate phone number, charged at �1.50 per minute - about ten times the amount the call should have cost.

Some clever little fraudsters is obviously printing up things that look like pre-paid calling cards (with their own 0911 premium rate number on) and scattering them around the streets, hoping that someone comes along and picks them up thinking their making the best of someone else’s misfortune.

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