Beware of Phantom Call Charges

peter021072

I had 3 of these on my last bill, one for speaking clock, a ringback charge, and a call to a local Indian restaurant, all within the space of one hour which I contested.  BT refunded these charges which were minor, but without admitting responsibility. I wanted to record that my phone was being billed for calls I'd never made just in case these phantom calls continue with more expensive numbers.  I'm the only person in the house and normally use an overide number, so BT calls are quite rare and would never have called any of these numbers anyway.

This Telegraph article confirms BT engineers and subcontractors can tap into your number resulting in a charge. However this is usually restricted to the speaking clock, not ordering food!

iniltous

Although it’s possible an OR engineer somewhere in the network looking for a ‘spare’ pair could , (although it’s not policy)  , make a chargable call on someones ‘line’ to confirm if it’s spare , someone would have to be unlucky for this to happen more than once , and although everyone with these calls immediately claims they must be nefarious , there will undoubtedly be some that are made by people known or unknown to the bill payer , who have used the phone without permission, or in some circumstances deliberately intercepted someone else’s ‘line’ for that purpose….in a way another plus point for DV ( digital voice ) compared to PSTN  as this type of thing would be difficult to replicate on IP 

peter021072

iniltous said:

Although it’s possible an OR engineer somewhere in the network looking for a ‘spare’ pair could , (although it’s not policy)  , make a chargable call on someones ‘line’ to confirm if it’s spare , someone would have to be unlucky for this to happen more than once , and although everyone with these calls immediately claims they must be nefarious , there will undoubtedly be some that are made by people known or unknown to the bill payer , who have used the phone without permission, or in some circumstances deliberately intercepted someone else’s ‘line’ for that purpose….in a way another plus point for DV ( digital voice ) compared to PSTN  as this type of thing would be difficult to replicate on IP 

Being minor, I think these charges would be normally excused away in a household and would get lost amongst all the others. However, I live by myself, no-one else has been in, I also use a 18185 override, and these aren't the sort of calls I would make, or accidentally make. They also include the notorious speaking clock known to be used for line checks. 

Far from being unlikely, it shows how easily BT and their contractors can get away with it.  It's hardly the great train robbery, but everyone needs to keep a look out because if cheap calls can be made so can expensive ones.

littleboo

If it happens, it would be Openreach doing the test and it would effect all providers, not just BT. Out of interest, what were the call durations?

iniltous

In your case , perhaps it the case that as no one else has access to your line within your property , because you never have any visitors of any kind into your home  , no family , no friends, no carers , no visitors of any kind etc ,  so you can be confident it’s impossible that someone made the calls on your line , and therefore it must be someone in the external network picked up up your  line and made those calls  ( doesn’t explain why there would be several calls to different numbers called rather than a single isolated  incident) but it’s not likely that in ‘every’ case  this must be fraudulent ,  to suggest this is as ridiculous as myself stating that in every case there must be a person making the call on the renter ‘line’ and it’s simply the case that  the renter is not  aware of it or is forgetful.

From the providers point of view, it’s not worth arguing the toss for the small amount being challenged, that’s  why the charges are invariably waived rather than any admission of error , you may suspect the majority  of these phantom calls are techs in the network making fraudulent calls , I suspect the majority are calls made by people known to the renter , using the line  without asking or the renter doesn’t recall making the call , there is no way to know for sure.
FWIW , I once challenged a charge for a text ( given that my texts were supposedly inclusive) I felt a fool when I challenged the charge to be told that I texted the word ‘stop’ to stop receiving some rubbish from some entity that had got hold of my number …it was clear from the T&C ‘s that this wasn’t an inclusive text and that the change was legitimate