Telecom North America: serious about fraud - Fraud

The fake letter of credit

nospam@example.com (Jean Gottschalk) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:02:47 -0800

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).

The grey route manufacturing scam

nospam@example.com (Jean Gottschalk) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:51:50 -0700

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!

An interesting new scam. Is it legal?

nospam@example.com (Jean Gottschalk) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:14:19 -0700

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.

Suspicious emails seeking routes for "huge traffic"

nospam@example.com (Jean Gottschalk) — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:35:50 -0800

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.