Sri Lanka Cuts Off Calls To 13 Countries To Avoid Modem Dialer Scams
from the baby,-bathwater? dept
Now that broadband is becoming pretty common in many areas, the threat of the "dialer trojan" scam has become less of an issue. The scam would work by sneaking a trojan onto someone's computer that would take over the modem and dial some expensive toll-number as the ISP. The user wouldn't recognize what was happening until they got a huge phone bill a month or so later. This doesn't impact people who don't use a regular dialup modem, but there are still places where dialup is quite popular -- and as the methods for getting trojans installed have become more effective recently, it's no surprise that this is becoming a bigger problem in some places. Apparently Sri Lanka is one of those places, and the powers that be in that country have decided the best way to protect against the scam is to completely cut off direct-dial calls to 13 countries where most of those calls go. Callers will still be able to make operator assisted calls to those countries, but not directly dialed ones. Still, this seems like a pretty extreme response -- and it's likely that the scammers will quickly find other places to set up their scam phone numbers that aren't blocked.
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"CAPTCHA" for dialling?
If telecom were to ask for a random four-digit number each time and temporarily block all international calls after repeated failed attempts, I think it would be just about impossible to write a dialler that could get past it.
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