VOIP and SIP News

The Federal Bureau of Investigations in America has warned of VoIP being used to distract customers while their bank accounts are looted. There has been an increase of such attacks over the last few months.
Typically the customer will receive several calls in which he may hear anything from a dead line to a sex tape. Meanwhile the fraudsters may be transferring money in and out of your accounts.

Robert Moore, CIO at business communications firm PAETEC said: ““With the advent of VoIP and the newest phone system technologies, the defrauding of businesses which use those platforms has become ever more sophisticated.”

The scheme is known as telephony denial-of–service (TDOS) because it aims to tie up phone lines so that even if the customer wanted to phone the authorities they would be unable to. It also means that if the criminals have contacted your financial institution to defraud you, the financial institution would be unable to contact you to verify your identity.

The perpetrators are using multiple VOIP accounts which are created by a single user. The automatic dialling tool then creates hundreds of computer-generated calls per minute.

In one such scam a dentist lost $400,000 from his account in November 2009. Although the AT&T VoIP accounts were closed the criminals were never brought to justice.

The Associate Director of Global Fraud Management for AT&T, Adam Panagia, said: “Since this first incident, across the country we have recently seen an increase in VoIP being used to distract our customers during fraudulent practices.”