P.S. I'll find my phone. Who took my phone.

Drexen — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 02:44:32 -0800

UK phone fraud: Someone stole my phone and rang up £3000 of calls to Nigeria. The phone company says it's my fault for not keeping tabs on the phone and I have to pay it. Is there anything I can do? I'm with O2. I got the phone with my 12-month contract but hadn't been using it, because I preferred the usability of my old Pay-As-You-Go Nokia... so when the new phone went missing on 18th May I didn't notice. I made a call on 18th (Sunday) and then the thief started making calls on 19th, continuing until 23rd May. In that time they made 60 hours of calls, some to Nigerian numbers, some to UK mobiles and landlines.

I discovered what had happened last night when I got a notice that O2 had tried to take £3,042.86 out of my account (it bounced, because I don't have the money). I called them up for advice and they told me I was liable for the whole amount as "we expect customers to contact us as soon as they realise their phone has been stolen," and that I'd have to pay it back within 6 months. The best they could do was refer me to a debt collection agency who would offer longer payback terms with less to pay per month. I told them I'd have to talk to the police before I committed to anything like that.

I phoned the police, who took the details and said they'd pass them on to the phone investigation team. However, the operator seemed pretty ambivalent about whether they'd give me a crime reference number as "the question is, why didn't you notice the phone was missing?" At this point I thought the phone must have been taken around the start of June and told her as such. Now they're supposed to get back to me in the next 72 hours.

After that I phoned O2 again to ask them to send me a list of calls, and to check whether they'd barred the phone, which they had. I checked my statement online and saw the details about the calls that I listed above.

So: Is there anything I can do about this? Am I really liable for this fraud? Surely it wouldn't be the case if this was a credit card. Is there some regulating body I can complain to? Should I talk to a lawyer? Just refuse to pay up? Or am I screwed? I can barely afford this, and that's assuming they give me a long payment term without much extra interest to pay.

Drowning in fraudulent IP Relay Calls. Help!

IndigoSkye — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 12:32:59 -0800

IP Relay Scammers are plaguing our PBX operator. Is there anything we can do besides refusing to answer any IP Relay call? I work at a large Non-Profit and as such we're the occasional target of fraud attempts. Recently we've been targeted by a ring of criminals attempting to us the free Internet Relay Call service (discussed on MEFI here) provided by phone companies for the use of deaf and hard of hearing individuals, but abused by scammers.

Is there anything more we can do besides refusing to answer these calls once an operator connects them to us? It's really beginning to tax our resources, which are already pretty constrained since we're a non-profit.

The IP Relay companies claim they can't help us because of privacy and common carrier laws. Those same laws make it impossible to track the fraudsters without setting up a sting, which as a non-profit, our BOT would not let us do.

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P.S. I'll find my phone. Who took my phone.

Drowning in fraudulent IP Relay Calls. Help!