On 14-Jan-04 Keith Watson wrote:

Here's one that'll make you smile. I can't be to specific because of commercial confidentially issues.

We recieved a number of support calls yesterday from private users. They had been complaining to BT about charges incurred when their computers repeatedly dialed the access number of an ISP that they didn't use (in fact most of them didn't know it was an ISP number). BT in their usual cock-eyed way had spotted that we are a customer of this ISP and told the users that it was a number assigned to our business.

Bless them! How cute!

It wasn't, in fact it was nothing to do with us. We told the users to check for viruses.

However the circumstances made us suspicious that some script kiddy somewhere was trying a sort of telephonic DDOS against the ISP.

The killer is that the number used was an 0845 number.

Quite possibly a DDOS. But also, if I'm not mistaken, although 0845 numbers allow national calls at local rates, I believe the subscriber of such a number can rake off a percentage of what the dialler pays for calls to the number.

So another hypothesis could be that there's a little scam going on here. Since you're a customer of the ISP, you're in a better position to judge this hypothesis.

Not much you can do about it except say "Nothing to so with me, Guv", provided BT now accept that it's nothing to do with you and stop telling people that it's your number. Otherwise you could end up getting sued by irate victims. Shouldn't take you long to get off the hook if that were to happen, once you produce the facts, but a PITA all the same!

Good luck! Ted.

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