AT&T Lets Phone Fraud Victims Off The Hook

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

Over the past three months there have been a ton of news stories about the "yes... yes... yes..." voicemail scam. The way it worked is that scammers would try the default voicemail PIN code for various voicemail systems on AT&T accounts. Once they got in, they would change the outgoing message to a series of repeating "yes" statements. Then, they would make a third-party call to some overseas country. The AT&T system would call the phone number to get approval, would reach the voicemail, and assume the recorded "yes" statements were approving the third party call. The big story in all of this, though, was that AT&T didn't do anything to change their easily cracked system and were demanding that their customers who got scammed still had to pay up. However, the mounting pressure and repeated press coverage seems to have finally made AT&T cave. They will not charge any of the victims of this fraud (who often found themselves responsible for tens of thousands of dollars) and have apparently changed the third-party calling approval system to make people read out a random number to prove they're human. It's good that they made these changes, though, it's something they should have done immediately, rather than waiting until the flood of negative publicity showed up.