Unexpected Charges on my phone bill.

[canfossi]

I recieved my phone bill yesterday and there were $15.00 worth of unexpected charges from Indonesia and another from some other country (don't have the bill in front of me right now) I got them reversed but the lady at the phone company said that some websites may of tacked them on while I was surfing the internet. Has anyone else had this trouble before? Thanks, Chris

[foxtrapper]

Some friends have had this happen, just as your phone lady said. Surfing smut is the usual cause.

[Cornhusker]

We had a similar thing happen when we had dial up. One of the kids was staying with us for a while and we had charges from all over the world.
If I remember right, it was a couple hundred dollars.
The phone company took the charges off our bill, and the kid got banned from the computer.

[CraftyDiva]

Yep, smut sites will allow viewing of movies or pictures and charge your phone for the pleasure (pun intended), no need for a credit card anymore. Any horney teens in your house? You could look there for your answers.

[BigBoy]

Even though the phone co. and others will tell you that it's impossible to be charged unless the call is made from your phone, it isn't.
In 1998 I found over $500 (just 4 calls) in charges on my phone bill. Phone company said that they HAD to have been dialed from my phone. We checked the dates and times and they were made at 3-4 AM on days that we knew we were both in bed asleep with the PC turned OFF.
And no, we didn't pay.

[Cornhusker]

Originally Posted by BigBoy

Even though the phone co. and others will tell you that it's impossible to be charged unless the call is made from your phone, it isn't.
In 1998 I found over $500 (just 4 calls) in charges on my phone bill. Phone company said that they HAD to have been dialed from my phone. We checked the dates and times and they were made at 3-4 AM on days that we knew we were both in bed asleep with the PC turned OFF.
And no, we didn't pay.

Do you have a cordless phone?
There are people who will look for a dial tone on a cordless (some transmit quite a ways) and call 900 numbers from their car.
We had a neighbor across the street one time who had the same kind of phone. We'd get their calls, and sometimes you'd pick up the pone and someone was talking. It was like having a party line.

[mistletoad]

There are also companies that sell anti-virus software and bill it to your phone number! My son mistakenly signed us up for that one - it offered money off something he wanted to buy and he didn't read the small print. Our phone company says you can put a block on these types of charges - "bill through" I think they called it.

[Donovan K]

There is also spyware out there that will download and install itself just from being online, it doesnt have to have your browser on a nasty site. The spyware is a phone dialer that will call an international number, usually, and cost you a pretty penny. Another good reason to regularly update your anti virus and anti spyware programs and run them often.

[BrahmaMama]

I'm in Ontario too, and I got a call charged from Somalia. Don't know anyone in Somalia, don't want to either.

[Quint]

Originally Posted by Cornhusker

Do you have a cordless phone?
There are people who will look for a dial tone on a cordless (some transmit quite a ways) and call 900 numbers from their car.
We had a neighbor across the street one time who had the same kind of phone. We'd get their calls, and sometimes you'd pick up the pone and someone was talking. It was like having a party line.

And there are some people who will scour garage sales and resale shops and pawn shops for old cordless phones to do the old "drive around looking for a dial tone trick" but your newer better quality phones are more resistant to this. But for better results they just sneak over to someone else's house and wire the cordless into their neighbor's demarc and then sit at home with the handset and make calls while the neighbor gets the charges. Heck, once you remove the guts and boards from a cordless base station you can just about stuff the whole thing into a demarc and run a stealthy and unobtrusive wire for the antenna for better reception and transmitting range. You could walk up behind someone's house and have the whole works up and running in under 5 minutes with no one the wiser until the bills come rolling in.

A person could get away with something like that for at least a billing cycle before anyone figured out what was happening. As long as the calls were made in the dead of night when everyone was asleep or in the day when no one was home it would be very hard to detect until the bills came. Come the billing cycle the works just gets moved to another location in a several block radius. You could run a scam like that for years in the suburbs before running out of houses.

[MELOC]

or just sneak to a neighbors "demarc" with a hardwired phone and a coin, and install into the main or test jack. people could have done that to you. once they unplug and put the screw back you would never know about it.

[Quint]

Speaking of demarcs. I was sitting behind a pharmacy this morning in a state ,town and location which will go unnamed and noticed a big ol' wad of wires hanging out of the bottom of the demarc. Thought of this thread. Those wires were inches from the overgrown side of an abandoned garage. A person with nefarious intentions or just a snoop or someone who just wanted the challenge could easily tap that demarc from that gob of wires and either make calls on the pharmacy dime after hours (moderately harmless) or gather tons of sensitive information during business hours ranging from credit card numbers to sensitive pharmaceutical codes and numbers. Judging from the paint, vegetation and debris surrounding the demarc they probably haven't opened it in years. Like walking down the street and seeing the doors to the bank unlocked and vault door hanging wide open. You're amazed someone hasn't walked in and made off with the place.

[modineg44]

This happened to me so I had long distance blocked on my phone. I can still dial 800 numbers. For LD I use Onesuite with a backup card from Sams. In a pinch I can use my Tracfone. This has worked for me for almost two years.

Nancy

[BeeFree]

I had this happen to me on a phone bill. I called the phone company when I saw my bill and asked about it. They had all the information. It had come through my computer line. I had answered a survey and they had billed my phone company while I was on line answering the survey. My ph co was nice enough to remove it for me. Since then I do not answer surveys.