Home > Reported Scams

Rogue dialler rings up £123 of charges

Posted on 15 / 03 / 2006

N/A
N/A

The BBC Watchdog program highlighted an online scam I was the recipient of. The first I knew of it was on my quarterly BT phone bill, which had a £123.97 call charge under my Internet Usage segment. Got onto the blower to BT and they said this was from Internet usage. This made no sense because my Internet package was unmetered and paid monthly with BT. After being passed from pillar to post a BT assistant suggested it was more than likely a rogue dialler program. I had no idea what this was and it took a little explaining by the customer services department before it was all clear. It seems by using the Kazaa file sharing program a little program had been installed which proceeded to ring a premium line phone number over and over every day. Well I refused to pay the bill to begin with, but BT were adamant it was my problem and they would cut off my phone service if I didn't pay it. What choice did I have but to pay ? :(, after a little research the premium numbers in question were found to belong to a company named 'Opera telecom'. I visited their website and contacted them by their email form and finished by printing my contact details at the bottom of their form. To their credit Opera phoned me back within hours, and told me the numbers belonged to VDEM, who apparently ran a website called Derbiz.com (they told me they had received a few similar complaints at the same time). I emailed derbiz for a response to my allegations of them scamming me but without reply. I would complain to somebody but is there a point? I daresay these companies can setup this scam over and over again.

User Name - dan239

Posted on 25 / 10 / 2006

N/A
N/A

A belated follow-up post, after reading another forum someone posted saying the derbez.com site will try to download a Trojan Horse Dialler. So beware and make sure your computer is as secure as possible.

User Name - dan239