TOT: HSBC scam letter

[Mike Barnes]

Tim Streater :

Ring your own number. You should get the engaged tone and it will cost you nothing.

[Andy Champ]

Occurs to me to dial my own mobile...

Andy

[Dave Liquorice]

That's probably where I would look first, find the print way too small and wander off to the web. I'd have hung up the phone before starting to look for the number though.

[dennis]

If you hang up, lift the receiver and get dial tone then just dab the hook switch the exchange will think you are pulse dialling and stop dial tone, the scammer will probably be waiting for the tones.

[Tim Streater]

Does that still work? Do they still support pulse? Not sure I have a suitable phone, anyway.

[Davey]

My rural exchange still works if I plug in the old dial 'phone I keep handy in case of a power cut.

[Allan]

It used to be that on a landline phone the call remained connected even when you hung up, if the other person initiated the call. It used to remain connected forever (the so-called CSH condition, standing for "called subscriber hung") unless either the caller hung up or someone at the exchange forced the call to be cleared - but that was a long time ago when I worked in a Strowger exchange). I don't know if that is still true or not. So you could "hang up" and go to look for the number, and then pick up the phone later and hear their fake "dial tone". I doubt that hey had number recognition, but I presume they had a tone recognition system that simply removed the dial tone and connected back to a human when it heard any key tone. If they didn't have a human available at the time, and had to put you on hold, that would just make it more believable.

Allan

[Davey]

This was recently discussed at length, probably in the uk.telecom group.

[Dave Liquorice]

Still does I think but some exchanges will send ringing to the called sub if the caller is still there for a time (FSVO "a time") when the called sub hangs up.

[alan]

The problem with this type of software commonly used on "customers" computers is that it will become a target itself for viruses/trojgens etc. You are possibly more secure by not using it.

[alan]

Goldfish CC (when they were still around) sent me all my credit card details - name, address, cc number, internet user name, password and pin number. The information was split between 3 separate snail mails BUT they all arrived in the same post in distinct Goldfish branded envelopes.

When I wrote to them suggesting that there was something wrong with the system I got the "standard" reply that it was secure!

[alan]

I had my card blocked when I purchased something on Ebay and ticked the box to pay an extra £1 to a designated charity. The payments from my card went to two different recipients with the same time stamp which triggered the automatic blocking.

[alan]

Have you made a purchase for £6.21 in Luxembourg? You have to realise this is where Paypal is located for billing purposes. Or you have to know that the little shop where you used card is part of a chain and all the card transactions are attributed to a location 300 miles away from where you used your card.

[brightside S9]

Press Recall and put the hanset on hook. Phone will ring. Don't answer it. Wait for ringing to stop. Take handset off hook and you'll have genuine dial tone.

[Steve Thackery]

Still is that way for landlines, but not mobiles. Mobile networks support backward-clearing, so the call is terminated if either party clears down.

I thought that feature was only found on PABXs? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think BT would let one type of exchange differ from another type when we're talking about such a fundamental feature.

The only user-noticeable difference I'm aware of is the message-waiting interrupted dial tone, which differs between System X and System Y exchanges.

However, I've been out of BT for some time, now, so my knowledge could be out of date.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Well yes, email is effectively free, whereas even bulk mail costs. Although Virgin don't seem to have found this out yet. ;-)

[dennis]

Its not. There is a timer that clears the call after a minute or three.

Its the calling party that's paying for the call so you shouldn't really clear the call if he doesn't.

[Zimmy]

It would have to be a pretty clever fake system that removed the dial tone as soon as you pressed a key then waited the exact right amount of time while you dialled the number before playing the ringing tone and then pretending to answer... I dare say it could be done with a modem and some specially written software, but surely easier just to target the most gullible.

It wouldn't work on my phone at least as you can always hear my autodialer routing it through 18185.

Z

[Andy Burns]

No, just a few minutes work writing a script for Asterisk ...

[Steve Thackery]

I, also, think it could be done quite easily.

Surely it's time for BT to implement backward clearing. No doubt it will break a few systems here or there, but they'd soon get updated. It can't be common for a system to *rely* on no-backward-clearing in order to work.

I don't want someone to be able to tie up my line, even for a few minutes.