Burglar Alarm. Phone Line Scam.

billsavings

Article in todays Guardian.

"Ben Whitney's father just could not work out why his phone bill was so high. He's retired and recovering from a stroke, so he asked his son to take a look at it. The thing puzzling him most was a 20p or 23p call every day, sometimes twice a day, to an 0906 number at 1.17am each morning. The calls had started months ago, and if they carried on were likely to add £100 a year to his bill.

The calls lasted only a few seconds, but the high cost alerted Mr Whitney to the fact that they must be premiumrate lines. Had some rogue dialler or trojan software hijacked his father's phone? He contacted industry regulator Icstis for help - and was astonished to discover that the premium rate calls were being auto-dialled from the family home's ADT burglar alarm as it made a daily registration contact with the ADT monitoring centre.
Mr Whitney and his father were flabbergasted. The alarm had cost more than £1,000 to install, plus monthly service charges . The last thing his father had expected was another £100 or so a year in premium rate phone calls. "I traced the number via the Icstis website to ADT alarms," says Mr Whitney. " I made some enquiries and was told that this type of ADT alarm has to 'check in' every day by calling in to their system. The units come with an expensive revenue-generating number as default but I was told they can be modified to call a cheaper 0870 number by an ADT engineer"

http://money.guardian.co.uk/consumernews/story/0,,2056639,00.html

Heinz

ADT have just started what is clearly a quite expensive TV advertising campaign - I suppose it has to be paid for somehow!

Strangely, they use an 0800 number for those interested in buying.

moonrakerz

Heinz wrote: »

A
Strangely, they use an 0800 number for those interested in buying.

Isn't that funny, all the banks/energy companies/internet suppliers do that, but it's an 0870/0845 when you want to ring and complain !

inspector-gadget_4

billsavings wrote: »

Article in todays Guardian.

"Ben Whitney's father just could not work out why his phone bill was so high. He's retired and recovering from a stroke, so he asked his son to take a look at it. The thing puzzling him most was a 20p or 23p call every day, sometimes twice a day, to an 0906 number at 1.17am each morning. The calls had started months ago, and if they carried on were likely to add £100 a year to his bill.

The calls lasted only a few seconds, but the high cost alerted Mr Whitney to the fact that they must be premiumrate lines. Had some rogue dialler or trojan software hijacked his father's phone? He contacted industry regulator Icstis for help - and was astonished to discover that the premium rate calls were being auto-dialled from the family home's ADT burglar alarm as it made a daily registration contact with the ADT monitoring centre.
Mr Whitney and his father were flabbergasted. The alarm had cost more than £1,000 to install, plus monthly service charges . The last thing his father had expected was another £100 or so a year in premium rate phone calls. "I traced the number via the Icstis website to ADT alarms," says Mr Whitney. " I made some enquiries and was told that this type of ADT alarm has to 'check in' every day by calling in to their system. The units come with an expensive revenue-generating number as default but I was told they can be modified to call a cheaper 0870 number by an ADT engineer"

http://money.guardian.co.uk/consumernews/story/0,,2056639,00.html

This happened to me a few years back. After the ADT engineer came in to "update the dialler to be year 2000 compatible" - the following quarterly bills were very high. To cut a long story short, I got a refund of the call charges, purchased a 3rd party dialler, got them to remove their one and fit mine (for free) and then programmed it with my own set of numbers to call in the event of a burglary, fire, panic button etc.

I then - a little while later - cancelled the contract with ADT.

Inspector-Gadget