Telecommunication Services
Telephone Billing Scam
We've gotten a number of calls from employees who have learned of
a scam that has been used against government facilities and are
concerned about its use against BNL.
Typically, an outside caller represents himself as a telephone
repairman doing some testing and requests the BNL person to perform
a call transfer, dial 90#, and hang up. The intent of callers who
work this scam is to get access to outside lines and to place calls
that will then be billed to the targeted BNL extensions. (Charges
will appear on monthly charge reports of departments or divisions
that have been hit.)
In practice, the scam artist is presented with some difficulties:
- Only 10% of BNL extensions can reach an outside operator
directly.
- When one of these lines is called and the requested call
transfer to 90# is done, the caller does not get transferred to
dial tone, but to an AT&T operator (bad enough), WITH THE BNL
PARTY.
- Without going into details, the transfer of the caller to the
operator WITHOUT THE BNL PERSON BEING A PARTY can be successful
only if an exact timing sequence is followed. But still,
there is enough concern about this to merit a warning to BNL
employees.
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You should routinely refuse any such requests from supposed
telephone repair persons and you should report any such scam
attempts (or other suspected telephone scams) to Telecom
Services on Ext. 4058. |
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Last Modified: March 23, 2010
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