someone hacked our 800 #...?

[petepaz]

not sure why but we noticed this month that our 800# charges went from $5.00 or less to $60 so we were checking the numbers that called. on a full sheet 8.5 x 11 of numbers only 3 were good all the others were out of service. after talking with the phone company apparently people can scramble the account numbers and some how make calls linked to your 800# (not sure i even understood what they told me) but anyway the number has been canceled. how many people is this happening to and they don't notice. i think it is some sort of scam by the phone carrier or someone that works for them so the owner is reporting it to the police.
crazy stuff ...what next? (maybe i shouldn't ask that..haha)

 

[Farmboy]

Nice. I don't see anyone profiting besides the phone company. Last year I had a number that wasn't mine tacked on my phone bill. I never noticed because the charges were small and to be honest I never read through my bill, all 20 plus pages. It came up on the radar when there was a $200 dollar charge for long distance calls. I'd been paying someone else s bill for close to 8 months.

 

[petepaz]

two things i said like above:
must be a phone provider scam or someone who works for them because who has access to the info and who else would benefit from this.
also i would imagine most people don't check this stuff because there are somany pages and so many taxes and so on. 99% of the people aren't going to notice $5 here or $7 there and at the end of the year if you do this to enough people for 12 months you have your self a nice profit. i check my personal bill a lot closer because of some charges i noticed that didn't belong (plus the kids are always downloaing crap so i make them pay for it..haha) but i had a $10 charge unexplained so i called verizon and it wasn't them so they gave me the number to call turns out it was some sort of IT company for online computer repair and they were charging me for a monthly repair fee so i asked who approved this they told me they had and email address (which was my wife's ) but no one approved anything, nothing in writing, nothing over the phone, just an email address. they didn't even know her name. crazy stuff they can do with out your approval

 

[Techman]

There is/was a way to dial a number, then enter a code so it will allow a person to call out on that number.. It was a big scam some years ago.
I don't remember the details

 

[Custom_Grafx]

Toll frees go to your local carrier who host a system called SCANTS, and if they are a smaller carrier, their system will route the number there (in australia anyway). The SCANTS system then does the translation to the terminating number.

You would need access to the terminal/database that controls SCANTS, or any other point before it which directs your 800 number elsewhere.

If this happened in Australia, I would go straight to management of the carrier, as one of their employees could be ripping them/you off, or there is some kind of programming error (unlikely but possible) in the SCANTS system. If they didn't seem interested I would go to the ombudsman, which in the states I think is the FCC?

Anyway, definitely fishy!

 

[SAS]

I never look at my phone bill, I have a credit card on file to pay it. Just like my cell phone, electric bill, home water bill, home electric bill.
I did get to looking over my bill a few months back and there was a charge for $49.95. I got to looking at other bills and it went back for the past 11 months. It was for internet advertising, that I did not ask for or was getting. It took two day and giving a bunch of people hell at Century Link and some third party bill company to get most of the money back. I still got screwed out of three months. I now have a block in place to block third part billing.
The phone company can only go back three months on a credit and I got six months back from the other people. I may could have pushed it more and got the rest, but I just gave up.
One of the people I talked to at Century Link told me that he has had people get charged $200 and has been paying it for years.
I told one supervisor that I wanted to get in on this scam, and I have people I need them to bill for me. She said who, I told her to hold on and let me get the phone book and I would get her some numbers.