North American Network Operators Group

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Re: TTY phone fraud and abuse

  • From: Scott Call
  • Date: Sun Apr 11 01:19:02 2004

On Sun, 11 Apr 2004, Sean Donelan wrote:

>
> On Sat, 10 Apr 2004, Scott Call wrote:
> > While both the Telco and ISP are communications services, they are
> > completely different beasts in the abuse department (as well as support,
> > provisioning, billing, etc)
>
> http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/dailystar/17393.php
>   Overseas scam artists have hijacked a telephone relay system for deaf
>   people and turned phone operators in Tucson and nationwide into
>   full-time facilitators of fraud.

This is an interesting abuse of government mandated resources, but again
the scale and rapidity of it are nothing compared to the scale and
rapidity of spam/scam/zombie/virus stuff we have to deal with.

My point was that my $20 GE telephone cannot be made into a liability for
my telephone provider without my explicit participation, whereas a $20 a
month dialup (or $50 a month DSL, etc) customer can be a liability for me
just by being turned on.

Can people abuse the phone system?  yes, of course it can, but the
criteria for response are much higher, and in general the nature of the
network (low concurrent session limit, point to point, voice only) as it
is exposed to most people limits the damage that can be casually incurred.

-S


-S