ALUGgers who watched this evening's "Look East" will have seen that dialup phone fraud is in the news again -- people getting phone bills for hundreds of pounds for internet calls to Vanuatu, Chile, etc. on premium rates. Some Linux-users may have seen it too!
What I'd like to ask knowledgeable folk is: how does it in fact work?
I've never seen more than a vague description of it, on the lines that when one is on line "the call is diverted to a premium rate number", apparently through some subversion of Internet Explorer.
Well, just how does that happen? Does it disconnect and then immediately dial out to a new number, unnoiticed by the user? Does it change the dialup settings as originally stored in some system file and use these thereafter? By what mechanisms are these activities mediated?
This is not really a question about IE, though I'm sure that some "feature" of IE has a lot to do with it. I'm also interested in the question of how "generalisable" this mechanism might be: is it a transferrable skill, so that what can be done to IE today could be done to Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, ... , tomorrow?
(I find it reassuring that kppp throws up a window during the dialup process in which the dialog with the modem is shown, so that one can actually see what number is being dialled.)
Thanks in advance for informed replies! Ted.
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