Britain to get tough on dialers ?

[sarettah]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4050805.stm

Call for action on internet scam

Users have unwittingly run up huge phone bills

Phone companies are not doing enough to warn customers about internet "rogue-dialling" scams, according to premium phone line regulator Icstis.
It has received 45,000 complaints in recent months about dial-up internet connections diverting to premium rate numbers without users' knowledge.

Phone companies refuse to pay compensation because they say calls must be paid for.

They must warn people earlier about possible fraud, Icstis said.

If my bill goes over the usual £50 a month I want to know about it straight away - I don't want to be told when it's hit £750

Without realising, a program can be downloaded which diverts internet calls via a premium phone line.

Victims often fail to notice until they receive an unusually high bill.

Icstis spokesman Rob Dwight said: "Phone companies should get in touch with their customers sooner.

"If my bill goes over the usual £50 a month I want to know about it straight away - I don't want to be told when it's hit £750."

'Call barring'

Phone companies had the systems in place to spot fraudulent activity and artificially-inflated traffic, he said.

"We alert them to the numbers that we have under investigation and they should be looking out for these numbers," he added.

Telecoms ombudsman Elizabeth France said: "Certainly I would not be surprised to find my credit card company phoning me if I do something out of the ordinary.

"So I would expect phone companies to be looking to see if they can have a similar approach."

The biggest phone company BT says it is doing what it can to monitor fraud and warn people about rogue dialling.

Its advice to customers is to use call barring if they want to prevent calls to premium lines because, under the current system, once the call has been made there's little that can be done.

'Quite a task'

Gavin Patterson, group managing director for BT Consumer, said "We do look at customer's calling patterns and we do make interventions when they are out of the ordinary.

"We're looking at the moment at whether we can improve this."

But as BT handled 180 million calls a day monitoring was "quite a task in itself", he added.

The government has ordered a review of premium line services and is likely to say Icstis should have more power to deal with rogue diallers in future.

At the moment, it cannot demand pay-outs on the behalf of customer - it can only close illegal services down.