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I think I recall viruses doing the same in the early 90's, so this isn't exactly a new idea.

In some parts of the world it was the kind of thing you could have happen to the household by just letting your stupid little brother look at one or two naughty ads in the back of a magazine ..

I think there was a TV show or ad instructing children to pick up the phone and hold it near the TV which then was playing dial tones.

please source someone!!!

That's very common, yes. But it's also idiotic for general VoIP providers to allow access to such numbers. There's no reason they need to do that, and they hurt themselves and customers. Many of their US customers don't even need international dialing for the most part.

While you can make some money off fraud on normal-priced international calling it certainly makes it much more difficult and noticeable.

It's why malware that lets you call and text from a compromised phone is so dangerous to your typical user.

I would have thought that North Korea would be flagged as spam.

IIRC certain providers do block them, Comcast specifically comes to mind (despite their website giving it a calling rate)