We have recently discovered that many phone numbers, reported to be connected with unauthorized charges, are being targeted by spammers, who come to the website and make unrelated postings to the discussion threads.
At first it didn’t make any sense, we would see a thread where almost every user was reporting something completely different than all the others. Some said that the number belongs to a collection agency, some claimed that a telemarketer calls from it, others reported that the number belongs to a newspaper subscription service.
After a while a pattern emerged, all o f these threads had one thing in common: “true” users were reporting unauthorized charges while other postings were made by bots.
We started to monitor the threads and discovered that someone has been spamming these particular discussions. It seems they do it for one purpose: to confuse the audience and keep it off track.
In many cases they even create a discussion thread for a particular number well in advance before any fraudulent charges are noticed and reported. They then spam it with unrelated postings. Like, for example, in this thread the first posting was made on Feb 16th2008, and then only on March 5th users started reporting strange transactions (we didn't remove the 'bot' postings for demonstration purposes and will clean it up shortly).
We are now building the list of the phone numbers that match this pattern and so far have 60 phone numbers responsible for fraudulent charges. All the numbers are from 888, 877, 866, and 800 area code.
The fraudulent charges are placed using the following company names:'Link Services', 'Link Group', 'Source Limited', 'System Development', 'HBS', 'Electronic Business Resources', 'Image company', 'World Wide Services', 'World Trade', 'ICS Services', 'Homebase', 'Home Port', 'DEN Enterprises', 'EST Company', 'BEI', 'Site Services', 'Search Services', 'ESTA', 'SENSATE TECHNOLOGY', 'Market Billing', 'MCA Templates', 'Web Templates', Will Services, 'Office Services', 'Terra', 'World Development', 'UNITED SERVICES', 'SITE DEVELPOMENT', 'ALS', 'Mera', 'Search Management', 'ONLINE GROUP', and 'ACM'.
We are looking into ways to prevent them from posting. If you find a thread with the pattern described above, please use the 'Report Abuse' button to alert us.
