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Important!!!! This is not a joke.

Posted by Jonathan | Filed under Culture, E-mail, Technology

Have you received an e-mail with the above message in the subject line? I did recently and I opened it to find a warning about a phone scam that lures callers into calling certain phone numbers that look like regular U.S. area codes, but in fact they are redirect area codes to the British Virgin Islands, Dominican Republic and Jamaica. The result is that the individual is charged $2400 a minute with a final bill in the 10’s of thousands of dollars. The e-mail appears to be signed by an AT&T Field Service Manager along with a contact phone number, and is accompanied with a link to AT&T’s website describing the scam. So I decided to check out the e-mail’s claim.

I followed the link in the e-mail http://www.consumer.att.com/consumertips/areacode.html which redirected me to http://www.att.com/gen/landing-pages?pid=6456&DCMP=att_safety . The link is a legitimate AT&T webpage. I then proceeded to follow another link describing the scam. AT&T describes the scam this way,

“Periodically, e-mails warning of a scam involving calls from the 809
area code circulate. The e-mails contend that there has been fraud
associated with unscrupulous pay-per-call operators in that area code.
However, the message contains some misinformation, especially the
highly exaggerated cost of a phone call to the 809 area code, which is
a legitimate area code for the Dominican Republic. Fortunately, this
scam is less prevalent in recent years as a result of work done by
AT&T to eliminate access to fraudulent pay-per-call operators.”

I don’t use AT&T, but the VoIP service Vonage, so I thought I would find what they said about the situation. Their website did not give any specific details about the scam, but the listed rates for the above countries are $0.17, $0.12 and $0.20 respectively. While that is not the outrageous fees claimed in the e-mail, a 10-20 minute prerecorded message (if your silly enough to listen that long) could give good surprise on your monthly bill.

While the e-mail is not quite urban legend it does provide some misinformation about the fees a caller will be charged. It is also good to note that this scam is very rare impart to the efforts of AT&T and other phone companies to expose the scam and those behind it. For more information you can visit http://www.snopes.com/fraud/telephone/809.asp .

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Tags: , E-mail, Scams