For Whom the Fraud Tolls

PBX hacking phone froud

Telephone fraud has been going on for a long time. It became prevalent in the 1960s, when DTMF (Dual-Tone Multiple Frequency) dialing was being introduced to replace pulse dialing from then-current rotary phones. Crafty individuals educated themselves and fabricated handheld red, black, and blue boxes that could generate the necessary tones to alter the target … Read more

Hosted PBX Toll Fraud Attacks: Phreaking

Phreaking (or phone hacking, toll fraud, dial-through fraud) is not new. In the not too distant past it was often a domain of adolescents with modems, phone lines and a PCs looking to make a couple of calls on someone else’s tab to their friends out of state or, sometimes, out of the country. Those call volumes often went unnoticed in the overall vast number of calls on company’s phone bill.

Toll Fraud

But phreaking in this day and age has moved from geek to something more sinister and more damaging. Telephone phreaking of Internet era is a big business run by an organized crime. What’s also interesting is that telecommunications carriers reap substantial benefits from these activities by demanding payments for the tidal wave of illegal call traffic phreakers generate at the victim’s expense. Some insiders hint that phreaking is telecommunication’s industry’s biggest dirty secret, generating massive funding for carriers.

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