Prisoner Collect Call Scam

[SethK28]

I remember seeing something about a scam where prisoners would somehow rack up your phone bill by calling you collect. However I cannot find any info on this, any ideas?

 

[shortylickens]

This is older than old.

But one of the ways I heard was they called you pretending to be with ATT and asked you to dial something like 9,0,# and hang up.
Then they could make all the calls in the world from your line.

Like so much BS on the internet I think it only happened to one person, but the warning email got passed around to a few million people and caused panic.

You could ask ATT about it. But they are not usually willing to tell people how to exploit them. Thats why I usually ignore warning emails.

 

[dwil]

Can't do this from your home phones. It was a PBX office phone type of deal.

It does work, but you most likley won't see it at home.

 

[SethK28]

Originally posted by: dwil
Can't do this from your home phones. It was a PBX office phone type of deal.

It does work, but you most likley won't see it at home.

We just got 2 calls back to back from some Indian dude, we just hung up on both

 

[slick230]

Originally posted by: shortylickens
This is older than old.

But one of the ways I heard was they called you pretending to be with ATT and asked you to dial something like 9,0,# and hang up.
Then they could make all the calls in the world from your line.

Like so much BS on the internet I think it only happened to one person, but the warning email got passed around to a few million people and caused panic.

You could ask ATT about it. But they are not usually willing to tell people how to exploit them. Thats why I usually ignore warning emails.

I used to work for AT&T is their network security department. This kind of stuff happened EVERY day to businesses everywhere. Usually it was the receptionist that wanted to be helpful to the "phone guy" and transferred him to an outside line by hitting 9. 0 and #. Then the guy would use the line all day making calls all over the place. Sometimes it was from prison. A lot of the time it was from someone on a payphone on a corner in Queens, Brooklyn, LA, etc. They would charge people on the street $5 to use the phone and call anywhere they wanted for however long they wanted.

After working there for 5+ years, I got tired of dealing with the same stupid "victims" day in, day out. We would get the telecom manager on the line when we called these places, and explain exactly what happened and how it happened, and instruct them to tell all the mouth breathers at their business to not transfer unknown people to outside lines. But we would see the same companies getting hit, time after time, and they had the nerve to expect AT&T to write off the thousands of $ and minutes of usage that their stupid employees gave away. They never wanted to pay the bill for this stuff.

I had to get away from there.