There seems to be a new kind of scam, involving the telephone network: my sister (from her O2 mobile phone) called me (on my Alice fixed-line phone), but the Lithuanian premium-rate number 0037091005481 was displayed as caller ID – although we’re both in Germany! This has happened to dozens or probably hundreds of people in Germany in the last few weeks, apparently mostly to customers of O2 and Alice.
Of course, phone scams have been around for a while, but they usually involve social rather than technical engineering. The twist in this one is that the scammers must have hacked some kind of telephone switches. I don’t know what hardware and software phone providers are using these days, but I think it’s safe to assume that it’s connected to the Internet, and it’s increasingly involving VoIP. It’s also interesting to note that Alice cooperates with O2 for its mobile services. Integrating disparate systems can get messy – maybe a door was accidentally left open somewhere on the way?
Being curious, I called that mysterious number and heard the following recording:
Thank you for calling pentowork [sic? the name was hard to understand] payment system, the most efficient internet based billing solution. To receive your unique PIN code, you are required to hold the line for thirty minutes.
So the aim seems to be the same as in many other phone scams – get people to call an expensive number, and make them stay on the line for as long as possible. The three or four calls it took to correctly write down the recording cost me about €10, but I also got to enjoy some nice background music: Comanche from the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack and Man on the Moon by REM. I wonder what they selected for the remaining half hour…
More reports and speculation can be found at this thread about the scam (in German), some of which involves the Lithuanian secret service, letters to Vladimir Putin, emails to the Bundesnetzagentur and the fact that 0037 was also the international calling code of East Germany.