Comment by Guest98123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Guest98123 | Hacker News Reader

I have a related story. I was in North America, looking for an apartment in Australia. At the time I'd buy phone cards for long distance calls, and they'd always work fine.

So, I used the phone card, and tried to call someone about an apartment that looked great. According to the advertisement, it was a woman that owned the apartment and she had an extra bedroom she was renting. I called, and a man answered. It went like this...

Him: Hello

Me: Hi, I was calling about your apartment for rent online.

// Dogs barking in the background fairly loudly.

Him: Sorry, what was your name?

Me: John Doe

Him: It's difficult to hear, could you hold on a moment?

Me: Sure

// He puts down the phone, and it sounds like he's taking the dogs outside or to another room. In the background a TV is playing. I'm getting annoyed, but he finally returns 4 or 5 minutes later.

Him: Are you still there?

Me: Yes

// A woman starts talking to him from inside the house.

Him: Sorry, just give me one more moment.

// He starts talking and arguing with her. I wait two minutes, then hang up.

After the call, I was frustrated. The apartment sounded great online, but what a nightmare; dogs barking, people yelling at each other, and they wasted 10 minutes of my time. So, I moved on, and tried calling others. Sometimes I'd get through to the person, sometimes I'd get errors about not being able to reach the number. Fast forward a week, I changed my plans, and started looking at apartments in another Australian city, hundreds of kilometers from the first. I call for an apartment, and guess what I hear? That's right, the same recording from above. Now, I was confused. I didn't even expect it was a recording the first time. But, how was I getting the recording from a completely different number, in a different city? I called back, because I was getting curious at that point. To my surprise, someone answered the second time, and it was actually the person from the advertisement I was trying to call. It became obvious at that moment that someone in the middle was hijacking calls, and trying to keep people on the line as long as possible.

Have you heard of the "It's Lenny" bot?

https://www.reddit.com/r/itslenny/

It's meant to keep telemarketers on the phone and waste their time, but it sounds like someone was using something similar for international phone fraud.

Great link, although Lenny has now wasted my time too.

Goldmine. I just listened to a call where Lenny put the telemarketer on hold for a 2nd time to quiet his ducks. It's amazing how getting telemarketers to repeat themselves for the fifth time to a bumbling old man really takes the optimism out of their voice.

> Lenny put the telemarketer on hold for a 2nd time to quiet his ducks

That's all of them (if the marketer stays on long enough).

This makes me want to create an Eliza implementation that's optimized to waste as much telemarketing time as possible. All that would be needed is a phone that lets you write your own telephony application and use it to answer calls.

Similar and much more polished is the Jolly Roger Telephone Company: http://www.jollyrogertelco.com

A friend who is in the voip business said that the calling card companies can buy software to manage the billing. In the billing software itself is a tunable to determine how much fraudulent charges to add to each call.

For instance, when a call is made, add a certain number of seconds to the call amount at the end of a call.

So if you add 5 seconds to a call and are doing 6 second billing, then on average about 84% of customers will be charged an extra increment of time. Who keeps track of their calls to such an exact time? Nobody.

Sounds like a real life variant of redirecting the cents hidden by rounding.

I created an account to reply to you. This happened to me as well! Literally the exact same thing. The dog, the man, the argument, everything. Thought I'd dialled the wrong number.

I used to buy phone cards to call home in Australia long before online calling was available. Wasted far too much money on it. I'm glad it's a thing of the past.

I'm surprised they bother when the scams cheap cards pull are often waaaaay easier.

The cheekiest example I've seen was great in its own way: it defined an advertised minute as being 55 seconds long.

I wonder if they've done any research on what sort of recording keeps people on the line the longest.

I'd like to offer you a job in our marketing org

I would guess fake ringing tones, because the victim would think the phone hasn't been picked up yet. Animal Farm might work once or twice for curiosity's sake, but eventually people will cotton on. With a fake ring tone, they'd keep dialling until someone picks up.

That is weird. Did you ever see a charge from the call? Or I guess if it was a prepaid card, the minutes just drained faster?

Yep, it was a cheap prepaid card from an Asian grocery store, so it just deducted the connection fee + minutes. I can't remember the cost, but it was likely less than a dollar for the call. I guess if you're hijacking hundreds of calls an hour though, it's a big business.

>Yep, it was a cheap prepaid card from an Asian grocery store, so it just deducted the connection fee + minutes. I can't remember the cost, but it was likely less than a dollar for the call. I guess if you're hijacking hundreds of calls an hour though, it's a big business.

I wonder how dodgy these phone card companies actually are. You could target a specific demographic and then mess with any calls to places they're unlikely to dial.

Say you were doing it and selling the cards in British corner shops. The customers are most likely going to be calling Eastern Europe and South Asia. They're probably not going to be making many calls to the US, so you can mess with some percentage of those.

If that's an Australian number, we actually have a reasonably decent enforcement regime. If you post the number then I'll have it reported to the ACCC, who I suspect would dearly love to actually catch an Australian fraudster given most of their reports are from India or Pakistan and somewhat untouchable.

Incidentally, a friend once got "Microsoft" on the line and they gave a return number. Curious, I called it. "Microsoft" answered. Quick as a flash I said "I don't have much time, they're on to us!"

They were unphased. Until I abruptly disconnected, then called Crime Stoppers and then conference called them in. Crime Stoppers were very unhappy with me for doing so, but after that call I waited 5 minutes then called the original number. It was disconnected!

It was using a calling card, so I needed to dial the local calling card number, type in my prepaid ID, and then the destination number. So, although the destination number was Australia, the issue occurred somewhere en route before then.

That's hilarious. I wonder if the scammers hired actors + set up a scene to make the recording.

thanks for taking the time to type that story - great story.

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