Telecom fraud is AFAIK the oldest form of computer fraud. I hadn't been blogging even a month when I posted about a fellow who called himself Cap'n Crunch because he used the whistle in the cereal box to steal free long distance service. It seems that the whistle put out a tone at exactly 2600 Hz which happened to be the tone that the phone switches used for signaling commands.
Well, it turns out that telecom fraud is down, because the people who would steal long distance time now use Skype. Of course, phone spam is way up because it's easy for the Bad Guys to fake their caller ID. The industry is working on fixing this but it will take years before it is deployed and nobody is entirely sure how effective it will be.
2 comments:
FWIW, telecom fraud seems to mostly be a US problem. In Switzerland, maybe - 4 times a year we get a spam call on our land line. Literally never on mobile phones. I haven't had an unsolicited text (SMS) message in years. What y'all have is a political/regulatory failure, not a technical one.
Brad, the laws here are a bit strange. My statute, a phone subscriber can block their Caller ID (for privacy). This seems to be what opened the door to mischief.
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