And just when we thought we had seen everything, there is always something new that people think of to steal from us. This latest stunt is by a delaware company called Voyager Technologies.
Instead of prepaying for their termination traffic, they offered to provide a letter of credit, which is completely acceptable.

A letter of credit is an instrument from a bank, by which the bank guarantees to pay any amount up to a certain limit on behalf of the debtor, at first demand. The beneficiary of the LOC does not need to demonstrate that the debtor owes them money or ague in any way, but simply state that they would like to draw a certain amount on the letter of credit, and the bank will promptly wire the funds.
Since the bank is potentially liable up to the full amount of the LOC, they generally require the debtor to deposit funds equal to the limit on the LOC into a frozen bank account as collateral.

You can imagine our surprise when Voyager Technologies emailed us a scan from what looked like a letter of credit issued by Bank of America for an amount of $100,000. This is an unusually high amount, since it would mean that Voyager Technologies would have had to deposit $100,000 in cash with the bank as a collateral, which seemed very unlikely for a company we had never heard of before.

They did however make one mistake in this scam: when a bank issues a letter of credit, they usually advise it (another word for "notify" in bank language) to the recipient's bank via SWIFT. Then the recipient's banker calls the recipient to let him know that a letter of credit has been issued to its benefit. This is how the beneficiary can know that the letter of credit is authentic, since anyone could manufacture a "letter from Bank of America" on their computer. I have attached this fake letter for reference.

BOA_LOC_10272009.pdf

When in doubt, always very the information independently, which in this case, would consist in calling Bank of America through an independent phone number (not one provided by the customer, which could be a fake number from an accomplice).

It looks like people are reading my recipes to manufacture gray routes, and promptly invented a stand alone business to do this. This is the "proposal" we received today from a company calling itself a FAS provider:

To whom it may concern,

My name is Alex and I would like to share with you the service that we invented to allow you to make use of False Answer Supervision, commonly known as FAS.

It is possible to generate up to 20-22% additional profit by mixing fake FAS calls into your existing traffic. The description of how it is made can be found on our web-site. It is easier to understand the benefits by following this example:

- Imagine that you have a route processing 10,000 calls per day.

- The ASR of the route is 38%, the ACD is 4 minutes.

- Thus, the total billable minutes of the route are 15,200 minutes.

- The cost of the destination is 10 cents, out of which your markup (as of a transit carrier) around 0.5 cents.

- Thus, the total turnover of this route is 1520 USD per day.

- The total profit is 76 USD per day.

Adding 1000 fake FAS calls to your route (with the intent to substitute failed calls with fake FAS calls) will turn the ACD to 3.2 minutes, the ASR to 48%, the turnover to 1536 USD, the profit 92 USD.

The technical side of that can be done with the help of our service.

Cheers ☺

Sincerely yours, Alex.

When customers call us to ask if we sell Cuba termination for 50c/min, I sometimes joke and tell them "sure, I'll give you Cuba for 1c/min, but it will have 0% ASR". Or some other times, I tell them: well, why don't you make your own Cuba route using the following recipe:
- for 10% of the calls, connect them to our white route that is very expensive
- for 30% of the calls, give connected dead air. People are used to that on Cuba
- for 30% of the calls, give an endless ringtone, and connect during that ringtone
- for 30% of the calls, make up some messages in Spanish saying "Hola Hola", and play them
You would make a lot of money like that!

This is of course meant as a joke, to prove that Cuba only works if you pay the legal cost to terminate it, like with every country in the world.

Well, it seems that some people have followed part of my advice, as was reported by one of our customers in Brazil. They reported the following going on on gray termination routes to Brazil:

The call is answered and a recorded message with woman's voice in Portuguese is played randomly instead of terminating the call to the cellular network. The message is about 2-3 minutes long, and saying “Please wait, I’ll call the person; please wait a little longer – he’s coming, etc” with the aim of keeping you on the phone and taking your money.

It is a very sophisticated scam since the message sounds like a real person – it’s like somebody really picked up the phone from the other side! The message is played randomly and appears once every 4-5 call attempts. You can get it with the first call or if you call 4-5 times the same number.

The customer learned about this scam about a month ago using a wholesale termination service called VoiceTrading: http://www.voicetrading.com.

Thank you Ben for reporting this to us!

When you miss a call on your cellphone from a number that you don't recognize, what do you do? Well, apparently, if you're like most people, you just call it back.
This seems to be the basis for a new scam that one of our wholesale customers was trying to run recently. It was a brand new customer, and all they were interested in were CLI routes to many countries in the Middle East. The price was secondary, which is always suspicious.

The scam works like this: the customer finds huge lists of cellphone numbers, then sets up an auto dialer which rings the phone once, then disconnects. As a caller ID, they pass a shared revenue number in a country like UK or Estonia (in this case it was Bulgaria), which they own. Now if they make 100000 such calls, and only 5% of the caller call back the number that shows up in their display, and they make $1 for each inbound call to this number, you get the idea...

While this might be completely legal, it is deceiving for the thousands of innocent victims who end up with a charge for a $5 or $10 international call on their phone bill. It is also prohibited in most of our vendor contracts to use voice termination as pure method of signaling information, without the intention of establishing a bona fide voice call. Within hours we get complaints from the terminating networks in the foreign countries to remove such traffic. We therefore ask our wholesale customers not to send this kind of traffic to us for termination.

We want to inform you of a numbering change occuring in Morocco on March 7th 2009 at 2:00 UTC time.
Normally, countries changing their numbering plan give a grace period during which both the old and new numbering plans can be used. In this case however, the old numbering will end when the new numbering plan goes into effect this saturday. This means that your customers will no longer be able to reach Morocco from Saturday unless they dial numbers in the new format as follows:

a) To a fixed number currently beginning +212 2 or +212 3: insert the digit 5 between the country code +212 and the 2, or between the +212 and the 3.
Example:
+212 2 XXX XXXX becomes +212 52 XXX XXXX
+212 3 XXX XXXX becomes +212 53 XXX XXXX
b) To a mobile number currently beginning +212 1, +212 4, +212 5, +212 6 or +212 7: insert the digit 6 between the country code +212 and the 1, +212 and the 4, +212 and the 5, +212 and the 6, or +212 and the 7.
Example:
+212 1 XXX XXXX becomes +212 61 XXX XXXX
+212 4 XXX XXXX becomes +212 64 XXX XXXX
+212 5 XXX XXXX becomes +212 65 XXX XXXX
+212 6 XXX XXXX becomes +212 66 XXX XXXX
+212 7 XXX XXXX becomes +212 67 XXX XXXX
c) To numbers currently beginning +212 8 or +212 9: replace the 8 with 80 and the 9 with 89.
Example:
+212 8 XXX XXXX becomes +212 80 XXX XXXX
+212 9 XXX XXXX becomes +212 89 XXX XXXX

We have just been informed that cable cuts occurred on the FLAG FEA, SMW3 and SMW4 cables which provide connectivity to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Oman, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, Jordan, Indonesia, Greece, Myanmar, Qatar, Yemen and the UAE.
Since repairs are not expected before December 26th, you may experience congestion or other issues when calling to the above listed destinations.

We receive a lot of emails everyday from new carriers seeking to buy or sell wholesale minutes.

In the last few months, we noticed a strange pattern: we are frequently receiving emails from different unknown people claiming to seek termination routes for a large amount of traffic to various countries, sometimes several times daily.
Most emails mention contact addresses at gmail.com or various other free email providers, and all of them list a contact number of +1-858-348-0400

The contact names listed in the emails are various, such as Paul Clark, John Michaels, Tony Bh, Emma Collins. They all have various pitches with various needs and destinations rerquired.

We don't have any further direct information about the source of these emails (we replied once and didn't get an answer), but we advise caution as it looks very much like a fishing attempt involving possible fraud or scams.

ATT has informed us that due to observance of the Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, they are expecting higher than normal traffic volumes from Saudi Arabia and other countries with large Muslim populations from approximately December 6 through 9. We would like to share this information with our customers, so that you can make sure that appropriate routing is in place on your network. 3U is routing these destinations on the highest possible quality routes with plenty of capacity available.

Watch List of Affected Destinations: Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritius, Morocco, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, UAE, Yemen.

We want to inform the community that WTI LLC, a LEC in Seattle Washington, represented to us by Robert Manning, has stopped paying their bills due to 3U Telecom, and no further contact has been possible with the company and its representatives since last week.

While we pursue legal our legal options, we would like to warn others to be very careful when dealing with this company, and immediately pursue any possible outstanding balance due.

To start our blog on the right foot, we wanted to share some court documents about a lawsuit with Vebtel Obconic Internet Protocol Pvt Ltd in India, also known as Vebtel. This customer of 3U has not paid their bills a few years ago, and we sued them in court in India.

The Judge has recently granted our request to wind up the company, meaning that the company will be disolved, and any proceeds will be used to settle our account.

I have attached some court documents, as well as a short article in an Indian newspaper.

This hopefully shows how serious we are about fraud. We will go to large extents to help our honest customers in any way we can, and we will go to equally large entents to pursue those who try to cheat.

Hello!

Whenever we talk to our wholesale customers, particularly new customers entering the industry, they are always surprised at the many ways there are to get scammed by unscrupulous people who make money not by operating a legitimate business, but by taking advantage of flaws or trusting telecom carriers.

If our customers get hurt in any way, we often end up loosing them because they can no longer stay in business. This blog is an attempt to share information to help others avoid common mistakes, and to track new trends and techniques used by scammers.

We hope that you will find this information usefull.

Your comments and stories are appreciated.

Jean