[LINK] $700 phone bill - no one was at home

[Ash Nallawalla]

> From: Chirgwin, Richard

> Yep. But not only was the computer on; so was the modem; and software was
> active - my bet is that the browser was left open, or the 190 dialler was
> sitting in the icon tray. Or have we got a mouse that double
> clicks itself?

I looked up the person concerned in the WP and think that they are not in a
block of flats.  A less high-tech possibility is the old jumper leads in the
pillar box caper, or that they have a cheap cordless phone whose dialtone is
available to neighbouring houses (this is where I'd put my wager).

At Melb PC we have a subscriber whose Telstra bill showed $2000 worth of
data charges to a 1900 number and so he promptly blamed us, the ISP.  (No,
we don't have any 1900 dialups.)  We had to give him a log of all his
connections to our server and never heard back.  Our guess is that he
downloaded and ran some .exe file from a porn site and this changed the
number for our dialup to some 1900 number.

This con has been happening for some time, as per newsgroup accounts.

Could it dial when nobody was at home?  Sure.  An arbitrary program can do
anything, as long as the PC and modem were switched on.

- Ash