[VoiceOps] h.323 breech and toll fraud case

[Alex Balashov]

If there is truly nothing to be gained on the receiving side, even 
within the supply chain, then the only other plausible incentive to 
route calls to high-priced destinations would be to deliberately impart 
financial harm upon the victim company in question.

On 01/26/2011 07:43 PM, Alex Balashov wrote:

> Carlos,
>
> On 01/26/2011 06:20 PM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:
>
>> 1. What is the scam here? The recipient of those calls doesn't gain
>> anything, and placing a few calls to three specific satellite phones
>> seems to have little purpose. Many of the calls were concurrent. It all
>> happened in the span of just a few hours.
>
> In my experience, generally speaking the scam is contingent on the party
> that's doing the hacking being involved on both sides.
>
> They initiate the calls, but they are also in bed with whoever is taking
> the calls (or is a high-margin intermediary in completing the calls,
> depending on the cost structure of that particular destination and
> infrastructure). Therefore, they get some non-trivial percentage of the
> charges kicked back to them in some fashion or another.
>
> This is not an uncommon occurrence with telcos that run premium numbers
> or some special rural tariffs in other countries. It's rather akin to
> rural ILEC access charge arbitrage / traffic pumping schemes in the US,
> in the sense that someone either shows up at the telco's door purporting
> to offer some sort of "free" service or "novel" business model that
> seeks profit sharing in the access revenue to make it work, or, for the
> more ballsy ones, dispense with any such pretense and simply conspire
> with the telco to game some calls in with false answer supervision or
> other blatant tomfoolery in return for a cut of the toll action. The
> difference is that with costs in the several dollars/minute, there's
> just a lot more money to be made in other jurisdictions, not fractions
> of pennies.
>
> -- Alex
>


-- 
Alex Balashov - Principal
Evariste Systems LLC
260 Peachtree Street NW
Suite 2200
Atlanta, GA 30303
Tel: +1-678-954-0670
Fax: +1-404-961-1892
Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/