Phone hacking cost small businesses $4.73 billion last year
Imagine you are a small business owner and you suddenly get a bill from your phone company-for thousands and thousands of dollars in phone calls you did not make. Well, that’s what happened to an architectural firm in Georgia. According to The New York Times, Bob Foreman’s company ran up a $166,000 phone bill in a single weekend last March. But no one was in the office at the time. Foreman says it would have taken 34 years to run up those charges based on the company’s average bill.
Apparently hackers had broken into the phone network of the company and routed hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of calls from the firm to premium rate phone numbers located overseas. According to the Communications Fraud Control Association, the scam affects mostly small businesses and cost victims $4.73 billion globally last year- up nearly $1billion from 2011. Aaron Ross who is a tech security expert and runs Rossbackup.com says crooks “are going into companies hacking into their phonelines and making hundreds of calls a minute and letting those calls run for four or five hours.” The business is flourishing- according to Britain-based Yates Fraud Consulting, premium rate number resellers are growing- up from 17 in 2009 to 85 last year.
Here’s how it works. Hackers lease phone numbers- typically 1-900 numbers- that are high priced phonelines. The companies that lease out these numbers charge as much as $4 to $5 a minute and then give the lessee a cut of the amount. Hackers then dial-in typically on the weekends when no employees are around. That’s when the meter starts ticking- and if you are a customer of a small phone carrier, you’re in trouble.
Foreman is now disputing the $166,000 bill with his carrier TW Telecom. The bill has an additional $17,000 in late fees. Ross says that’s because smaller phone companies can’t afford to pay these enormous bills on their own, they insist on getting paid. Unlike the protections in place for credit card fraud there is no legal protection for consumers in these cases.
And unlike big name carriers such as Verizon, smaller carriers don’t have security systems in place that can alert customers to potentially fraudulent activity on their phone lines. If you don’t use a major carrier, Ross advises people to call up their phone company and put a limit on how much a phone bill can rack up in a month. Additionally he says, “You can also make sure no one has access to the internet or the phone. So if you’re using a phone that’s based on the internet, you have to make sure your passwords are secure, your voicemails are secure and no one has access to the building where its being run from. “
For a small business owner, getting stuck with a gigantic phone bill can bring it to its knees. Many of the firms have had to cancel expansion plans, lay off employees or even shut down. Ross says if you are going to use a phone that’s hooked to the internet, then you need to protect yourself just like you would your computer.
