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Watch The Calls You Return

    October 15, 1996 --- What would you do if you received an e-mail message that read as follows:

      I am writing to give you a final 24hrs to settle your outstanding account. If I have not received the settlement in full, I will commence legal proceedings without further delay. If you would like to discuss this matter to avoid court action, call Mike Murray at Global Communications on +1 809 496 xxxx.

    Except for the last four digits of the telephone number, this is the exact text of a message received by several readers of the Usenet comp.dcom.telecom conference last week. If you received such a message, would you respond by calling the phone number shown? Would you do so even if you knew for certain that you'd never had any business dealings with "Global Communications" or Mr. Murray?

    If you did, you might be the latest victim in a scam that has been working its way through the pager industry, and has apparently now reached the Internet. The reason this scam works is because many people don't recognize the 809 area code as an potentially expensive international call.

    Most people living in the United States and Canada have the perception that if you dial a number starting with the long distance access code "1", followed by an area code, the number has to be somewhere in one of those two countries. But that is not the case. There are a number of islands in the Caribbean that are not part of either the U.S.A. or Canada, but are within the 809 area code of the North American Numbering Plan.

    One person who received the above message had enough sense to call the number COLLECT. A voice with a proper English accent answered, and they heard "Yes, hello". Then there was a short delay (during which time the operator tried to obtain acceptance for the charges), after which they heard "Just hold on a second." Then in the background they heard the same voice, apparently speaking to someone else on another line about a debt that they owed. Eventually the operator's patience wore thin, so she redialed. Guess what? After redialing, they heard the same exact voice saying the same exact words, with the same background noises! It is just a recording, designed to trick unwary callers into holding the line as long as they are gullible enough to do so.

    I don't know what the conclusion of this particular call would have been, had they waited the recording to finish. I suppose it's possible that if the caller had been calling on his own nickel, and had waited long enough, a real person might have come on the line, offered to pull up his account, wasted a few more minutes "looking for the file", and then perhaps apologized and told him that it was all a big mistake. Should the latter have happened, the caller might have actually felt better about having made the call to clear up the matter - until the phone bill arrived, that is. But I suspect that the real outcome is that this recording simply continues to play, which occasional repeated requests to keep holding, until the caller figures out that something is fishy and just hangs up.

    The problem is that the telephone administrations on the various islands decide what the cost of a call should be. Just as the United States and Canada have extra-cost services on the infamous 976 exchange (and also in the 900 area code), other countries can decide that a particular exchange or number carries a higher toll charge than "normal" calls to that country. If someone gets their phone service on one of these "premium" exchanges and you call them, you pay the higher toll. And if you held on for a significant number of minutes, that call might cost you as much as you'd pay to take your entire family to dinner at a good restaurant.

    Pager owners were the first to be scammed in this manner. If they had a pager that displayed numbers only, they'd simply get a page showing a number in the 809 area code. If they had a display pager (the kind that displays a short message), they'd get a message stating that it was urgent that they call a particular number in 809. When they called, they'd get a recorded message of some kind, or perhaps the "please hold a moment" scenario described above.

    It's reached the point where the "Big 3" long distance companies have actually blocked access to certain numbers in the Caribbean, but that can only happen once a number has been positively identified as one used in a scam. In some cases the carriers have actually been persuaded to remove charges for calls to these numbers, but that's not a given - the customer did, after all, make the phone call. And the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission are looking into the matter, but in many cases there's not a lot they can do because they simply don't have jurisdiction over foreign companies or foreign telephone administrations.

    The deception is going to be even harder for the average person to detect, as certain islands break away from the 809 area code and take new area codes in the coming months. 809 will still be the code for most of the Caribbean (including Jamaica, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic), but Antigua will have the 268 area code, and Montserrat will be 664. Those new area codes should probably also be considered suspect if they show up on your pager, or in your e-mail. Some readers of the telecom newsgroups have suggested that if this type of activity continues, it may be prudent to require that calls to the Caribbean be dialed as international calls (using the 011 international prefix) so that consumers realize that they are dialing an international call, but that would require reconfiguration of every telephone switch in North America.

    In my opinion, people can avoid being the victims of scams just by using some common sense. No one is going to use failure to respond to a pager message or an e-mail message as the basis for starting a lawsuit - both mediums are still far too unreliable to be used for legal notice. And if you've never had dealings with anyone in the Caribbean, why on earth would you call a number there just because you received a threatening message? My response would be to simply ignore such a message, but if you really feel the need to respond, simply send a message in reply stating that you are not allowed to call international telephone numbers or accept collect calls, but if they'd like to call you at their expense, they are more than welcome to do so at a certain time. More than likely you will discover that the message bounces, because these scammers rarely put a valid e-mail address in the From: line of their message.

    And that brings me to one final point: Many people who are new to the Internet have no idea how easy it is to forge an address in the "From:" field of a message header. If you can't do it, it's only because you don't know how. There really is no way to authenticate a return address on an e-mail message (although if you receive ALL of the headers in your e-mail messages, and know what to look for, you can spot SOME forgeries pretty easily - but most people don't see all the headers in an e-mail message, because most mail reader programs default to not showing them).

    The reason that e-mail forgery is so easy is because the protocols for e-mail were developed back in what might be considered the "dawn of time" for the Internet, when most everyone on the 'net were professionals who trusted each other, and had a sense of professional ethics. I don't think they ever dreamed that e-mail would be used by people from all walks of life, all over the world, so they didn't include any security features that would have made it harder to forge a return address (it is worth noting that you may stand a better chance of detecting forged mail sent via the Internet than forgeries sent via regular "snail mail" that has a forged return address on the envelope and enclosure - in the latter case there may be absolutely nothing that would readily identify the mail as being forged. On the other hand, there are some stiff penalties for fraud committed using the regular mails, while similar laws do not yet exist for fraud committed via the Internet).

    So when you get e-mail and something about it just doesn't seem right, be careful - it may be that the sender doesn't exist, or it may be that they are using someone else's name and e-mail address (without their knowledge or permission). And you might want to think twice, or even three times, before dialing an unknown a phone number simply because your receive an e-mail from someone you've never heard of, threatening some sort of action if you don't call. It may be that you are one of thousands of people - potential suckers, as far as the sender is concerned - that are receiving the same message!

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