Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.9.1/8.9.1) id SAA07244; Wed, 19 May 1999 18:01:24 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 18:01:24 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <199905192201.SAA07244@massis.lcs.mit.edu> To: ptownson Subject: TELECOM Digest V19 #88 TELECOM Digest Wed, 19 May 99 18:01:00 EDT Volume 19 : Issue 88 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Cornelius NC Man Takes Aim at E-mail Scams (Stan Schwartz) FTC Cracks Down on E-mail Telesleaze Scam (Linc Madison) Global Crossings/Frontier Strikes With Tender Offer For US West (J. Stahl) New York's 646 Area Code (Eric Morson) PC Cordless Phone System Beta (Marsha Lybra) Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation (Brody) Re: 24-Hour 4.8c Long Distance (Linc Madison) Re: Imminent Exhaustion of the NANP Should be a Wake-up Call! (G. Roessler) TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copywrited. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occassional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. Contact information: Patrick Townson/TELECOM Digest Post Office Box 765 Junction City, KS 66441-0765 Phone: 415-520-9905 Email: editor@telecom-digest.org Subscribe/unsubscribe: subscriptions@telecom-digest.org This Digest is the oldest continuing e-journal on the Internet, having been founded in August, 1981 and published continuously since then. Our archives are available for your review/research. 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Please make at least a single donation to cover the cost of processing your name to the mailing list. All opinions expressed herein are deemed to be those of the author. Any organizations listed are for identification purposes only and messages should not be considered any official expression by the organization. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Reply-To: stannc.no1spam@yahoo.com From: Stan Schwartz Subject: Cornelius NC Man Takes Aim at E-mail Scams Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 12:04:01 -0400 ('The Charlotte Observer' 05/19/99) By ERIC FRAZIERAND DAVID BORAKS Staff Writers Clifton Taylor figured there must be some mistake. He and his grandson, Jake Bagwell, a Cornelius seventh-grader, were researching on the Internet in February when an e-mail popped up, saying they would be charged $375.98 for an order -- one they never made. Surprised, the boy's father, Joe Bagwell, called the phone number given in the e-mail. He found himself listening to a phone-sex service from the Caribbean island of Dominica. Shortly after, he received a bill for the phone call. It was less than $2. Like at least 20,000 other people across the country, they had been scammed by the same junk e-mail, or 'spam.' "I was really angry that someone had devised a scheme to charge parents money to introduce their children to a phone-sex line," said Taylor, 68, also of Cornelius. "I just want it stopped. And I want people to be aware of it." Federal Trade Commission officials said Tuesday that the Bagwell case prompted the first-ever federal Internet scam lawsuit filed against an unknown defendant. The suit aims to root out anonymous rip-off artists who ply their trade in cyberspace. The agency went to federal court in Charlotte last week and won an injunction to freeze the assets of the still-unidentified scam artists. By filing a civil suit, the agency can use subpoena powers to learn who's sending such e-mail. The agency expects to find out the identities of the operatives in a few days. The number Bagwell called has been disconnected. "It demonstrates for the first time that con artists that try to cloak themselves in the anonymity of the Internet are not immune from the reach of the Federal Trade Commission and the courts," said Eileen Harrington, the FTC's associate director of marketing practices. She said her agency had brought about 70 Internet scam lawsuits in the past five years, but unlike the Charlotte case, investigators knew the identities of the scam artists. The operatives who sent Jake Bagwell the bogus e-mail message hid their identity by using phony return addresses. The trade commission learned of the breadth of the scam by comparing the number Bagwell called with its database of phone numbers used in other scams. The same number turned up in dozens of other complaints. The injunction prevents American telephone companies from sending payments to Dominica for the phone calls. Four states have laws making most spam illegal and many more are considering similar laws. The N.C. legislature is considering a bill that would outlaw bulk e-mail software and let N.C. residents use state courts to sue people in other states who send spam. The N.C. bill has passed the Senate, and awaits action in the House. Scams involving junk e-mail and high-priced long-distance services are nothing new to federal investigators. In late 1996, an Iowa company was implicated in a scheme that used e-mail promises of free travel to lure people to make lengthy and expensive long-distance calls to the Caribbean. In that case, the operator of the service agreed to settle the case by repaying $111,000 to consumers. In early 1997, the FTC filed a complaint against several Internet marketers regarding a scam that involved pornographic Web sites and phone calls to the former Soviet Republic of Moldova. Users were told to download a free electronic 'viewer.' The device turned out to be a program that automatically hung up and re-connected the user's computer to a phone number in Moldova that charged $2 to $3 a minute. The FTC obtained a court order to shut down the operation. The number of Americans using e-mail has risen sharply in recent years, now reaching more than 35 percent of adults. But as e-mail use has grown, so has spam. Spammers use their messages to promote everything from adult Web sites and telephone-sex lines to get-rich-quick schemes and even junk e-mail software. Online services have been fighting bulk e-mail for years, but finding and prosecuting those who send it has been difficult. Virginia-based America Online, the world's largest online service, won one of the first court cases against junk e-mail in 1996 and has introduced special controls that allow users to block unwanted e-mail. Taylor, a retired schoolteacher, said people need to be alert to e-mail scams. He was so outraged by the scam that he called every public official, agency and police department he could think of, including 21 state lawmakers, the FBI and America Online. Now he's just glad his one-man crusade finally paid off. "It's been a battle," he said. "But when I get my back up, I get a little tenacious." ------------------- [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Sometime in the next day or so I will publish something here a bit unusual for this Digest -- a rather lengthy piece of spam from a fellow who sells spam tools and provides lots of assurances to readers that unsolicited email is really quite welcome by most users. His piece will explain that it is quite easy even for net-beginners to harvest email names according to the special interest or category they are seeking and then mass mail to those names. It should be an interesting issue, and I trust everyone will respond directly to the author with their own personal suggestions for how to best use his tools. Watch for it here. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 15:44:03 -0700 From: Telecom@LincMad.com.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: FTC Cracks Down on E-mail Telesleaze Scam Organization: LincMad Consulting The U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint in federal district court against unspecified operators of a scam in which victims received e-mails indicating that their credit cards were being charged several hundred dollars each for their orders of sexually explicit materials. If they had any questions about their order, they were directed to call customer service at 1-767-nxx-xxxx. Of course, most people outside the readership of this Digest would have no idea that area code 767 is the Caribbean island of Dominica (not the same as Dominican Republic), and that calls might run into dollars per minute. This is the first time that the FTC has filed a complaint against unnamed defendants. The defendants will be identified through the normal legal process, but in the mean time, the FTC is seeking an injunctino to prevent a number of U.S. from forwarding any settlements for calls from the U.S. to the number in Dominica. The FTC has been taking a more active interest in "telesleaze" abuses, including things like recent e-mail spams which list a "remove" number in area code 473 (Grenada). For more information on this filing, see the FTC press release: For more information about "telesleaze" in general, see my ** Do not send me unsolicited commercial e-mail spam of any kind ** Linc Madison * San Francisco, California * Telecom@LincMad-com URL:< http://www.lincmad.com > * North American Area Codes & Splits >> NOTE: if you autoreply, you must delete the "NOSPAM" << ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 12:32:12 From: John Stahl Subject: Global Crossings/Frontier Strikes With Tender Offer For US West Here is an article from Inter@ctive Magazine Electronic edition regarding start-up Global Crossings making another expansion move after making a deal to buy Frontier Corp. and it's 34 independent operating telcos. Makes for very interesting conjecture with regards how a startup can 'purchase' it's competitors without putting out any cash. In fact the article seems to read that US West is paying Global Crossings to purchase it. It used to be that one had to raise capital to "buy" another company; this doesn't seem the way in this 'new' era of creative financing. Forget "junk bonds", just issue new stock certificates instead! Article from Inter@ctive on-line: "Global Crossing Buying U S West By Louis Trager and Carol Wilson May 17, 1999 11:50 AM ET The latest telecom merger story has intercontinental cable upstart Global Crossing buying regional carrier U S West for about $37 billion in stock. In an unusual structure, U S West would first purchase about 9.5 percent of Global Crossing for $2.4 billion in cash. U S West shareholders would receive one Global Crossing share for each U S West share they currently own. Global Crossing would issue two tracking stocks for the combined entity. One tracking stock, designed to keep U S West's institutional shareholders happy, would follow U S West's phone business and would pay a dividend. Another tracking stock would follow Global Crossing's ambitious data plans. The merged company also would include Frontier, which Global Crossing has agreed to take over for $12 billion. The new entity will be called Global Crossing and will be owned 50 percent by Global Crossing/Frontier shareholders and 50 percent by U S West shareholders. Investors bid up U S West stock, which started May in the low $50s, to more than $60 May 14. U S West was lower today in early trading, down 8.4 percent to $56.88. Global Crossing shares dipped 4.8 percent early today, to $58.44. U S West has achieved greater success in data networking than in voice. Through its !nterprise Data Networking unit, the company offers network-hosted services in major markets besides its 14-state region. The carrier recently created a hosting unit which, in partnership with Deloitte Consulting and USinternetworking, offers businesses network-hosted applications. That data business could make a good match for Frontier, which is building a national high-speed, fiber-optic network and hosts data for big Internet players such as Yahoo!. Global Crossing wants to develop a portfolio of network-based services internationally. It's unclear how Global Crossing could digest two acquisitions of larger companies. U S West has a market capitalization of $30 billion, compared with Global Crossing's $24 billion." John Stahl Aljon Enterprises Telecom/Data Consultant email: aljon@worldnet.att.net ------------------------------ From: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com (Eric Morson) Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 17:00:15 -0400 Subject: New York's 646 Area Code I tried dialing the (646) 674-9999 test number, and got an intercept telling me that (212) 674-9999 was not in service. I dialed five other (212) 674-xxxx numbers at ramdon using the (646) area code ... they all went through ... It appears that (646) is in the switch and all calls to the single activated NXX are processing to the same NXX in the (212) area code. Any comments? Eric B. Morson Co-Webmaster AreaCode-Info.com EMail: Eric@AreaCode-Info.com ------------------------------ From: Marsha Lybra Subject: PC Cordless Phone System Beta Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 17:30:00 -0700 Organization: Ericsson Data Services Americas Ericsson is developing a PC Cordless Phone System, which provides an efficient multi-line, multi-user communication solution for the Small Office/Home Office as well as for the advanced household. This system leverages the power of the PC to provide advanced telephony features, unified messaging, remote message notification, and customized call answering to differentiate calls between personal and business calls. The product offers a Virtual Personal Assistant by utilizing a speech user interface (SUI), enabling users to simply speak commands into their cordless handset to perform such functions as: dial by name, setup conference calls, transfer calls, retrieve voicemail, email, and fax headers. We are looking for a limited group of qualified Beta testers to begin testing the product in the US. If you are interested in finding out more details about the product, as well as becoming a tester, please visit the following web site: http://beta.cybergenietech.com There will be several phases to the test process, which will begin early this summer. The following are minimum requirements for participating in the program: - You live within the United States. - You should be able to give weekly feedback on the product. - You have at least 1 - 2 phone lines available. - Your computer has: Windows 98 preinstalled (Windows 97 compliant hardware) A 233 MHz processor or greater At least 32 MB of RAM (64 MB preferred) At least 40 MB free Hard Disk space Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface (the system attaches to your PC via the USB port) CD-ROM drive Sound card and speakers Internet access E-mail account We will be selecting testers in the next few weeks. Marsha Lybra Field Test Coordinator & The Ericsson CyberGenie Team ------------------------------ From: Brody Subject: Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 01:10:05 -0700 Hi there, I'm trying to find out what ever came of the "Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation". I found your e-mail on a telegraph related site so I thought I'd drop a note. Thanks in advance for any help you can give me. Brody [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Whatever *did* happen to Postal Telegraph? I have not heard anything about them in years. I remember once meeting a man back in the 1960's who was by then retired from Postal Telegraph; he said he had been a 'repairman' for them. I recall they also had very nice clocks for their customers just like Western Union. Mark Cuccia seems to know so many of these things, maybe he will answer. PAT] ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 16:50:05 -0700 From: Telecom@LincMad.com.NOSPAM (Linc Madison) Subject: Re: 24-Hour 4.8c Long Distance Organization: LincMad Consulting In article , Fred Goldstein wrote: > On Sat, 08 May 1999, Paul Cook wrote: >> I often wondered why someone didn't do something like set up the old >> system of dialing a local number, handing you a dial tone and having >> you punch in a pin code and then the number you wanted to call. >> My thought was that the rate for such calls should be cheaper since >> there would be no "equal access" or 800 fee. And perhaps there would >> be a calling card that wouldn't rip people off either by charging >> enormous rates for connections or whatever miscellaneous call >> surcharges are imposed. > There is no "equal access" fee any more. If you're an IXC, you should > be paying very similar rates regardless of the type of access you > choose. If you're not OFFERED equal access, that's a different > story ... but there are only a handful of rural indies that don't have > it yet. > There are unscrupulous carriers who attempt to take calls on > "business" lines, rather than pay their access fees. In such cases > the caller pays for a local call, which (as Pat noted in the case of > early MCI) can be more than the "savings", or in a flat-rate area is > simply money the ILEC is technically owed but not collecting. I don't > know how long somebody can get away with this but I know of some > "VoIP" IXCs who've done it for over a year; LECs seem rather remiss > about enforcement these days. AT&T has a product, which they have even put their own name on (unlike "Lucky Dog"), using Feature Group A access (an ordinary local number you dial for a secondary dial tone). It's called Connect'n'Save. The rates are 7.5 cents/minute if you use one of their local dial-in numbers, or 15 cents/minute (plus possible payphone surcharge, waived for now) if you use the 800 or 877 number. You have to prepay and refresh the account in increments of at least $25. What I found most mystifying, though, is that for several months after they began marketing this product, they listed a local access number as "Walnut Creek, CA" even though the number was actually in Santa Rosa, about 50 miles away, in a different area code, and most definitely NOT a local call. They have FINALLY changed the Walnut Creek access number; it's still in area code 707 (meaning that you have to dial 1-707-741-0060 from Walnut Creek), although it is at least a local call from Walnut Creek. However, their ads say "Walnut Creek and surrounding cities, but if you are immediately south of Walnut Creek, in Danville or Dublin/San Ramon, the number is not local. What's more, it is a local call from Walnut Creek to the Pleasanton dial-in number, which is a 7-digit local call. In other words, their marketing people don't have a clue. They should have just kept the 707 number for Santa Rosa and changed the advertising to show "Pleasanton/Walnut Creek" for (925) 398-0060. The service is available from Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Miami, Phoenix, and most of the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco, San Jose, Pleasanton, Walnut Creek [actually Benicia], and Palo Alto [actually Redwood City]). You can read about it on , but don't try to find any reference to it anywhere else on AT&T's web site, even if you specifically search for "connectnsave". ** Do not send me unsolicited commercial e-mail spam of any kind ** Linc Madison * San Francisco, California * Telecom@LincMad-com URL:< http://www.lincmad.com > * North American Area Codes & Splits >> NOTE: if you autoreply, you must delete the "NOSPAM" << ------------------------------ From: Georg Roessler Subject: Re: Imminent Exhaustion of the NANP Should be a Wake-up Call! Date: Wed, 19 May 1999 13:55:56 +0200 Organization: Bosch Telecom Reply-To: georg.roessler@de.bosch.com Arthur Ross wrote: [..] > Some of my acquaintances who currently live in the Sophia Antipolis > (Cte d'Azur) area tell me that the scheme I described was indeed > the way it USED to work up until a few years, except that there was > only one zone (Paris, 01) and all the rest of the country was > zone-less -- eight digits was enough. > Only the French could come up with something this strange, I guess -- > vive la France! Well, this scheme nicely reflects that in France you either live in Paris or "en province". However, this scheme has been introduced for another reason, namely the exhaustion of numbers in Paris with the old numbering plan. In the scheme before all numbers were eight digits. There were almost 100 areas, about one per department. Phone numbers were 2+6 digits in general; only Paris (the whole metropolitan area) had a one digit area code (1) and 7 digit local numbers. Calls within your area were 6 digits (7 in Paris); to call to another area required a prefix (16), one or two digits for the area code and then the local number. Some time in the eighties, when the 7 digit numbers in Paris became exhausted, the transition to the above mentioned scheme took place. The two digit area codes became part of the numbers for all 2+6 areas. All numbers in Paris were extended by one digit (3 and 4 were used, depending on the original number, as far as I recall). Calls within each of the two remaining areas (Paris, province) had 8 digit numbers. To call to the other area required the prefix (16) and the area code (1 digit with value 1 for Paris, 0 digits for the other area). The recent change of the numbering scheme kept the 1+8 digit format for Paris. The other area is now split into four new areas with area codes 2, 3, 4, and 5, which results in the same format as for Paris. Other area codes are assigned for mobile networks, special services (free call, etc.). With this recent transition, the prefixes were also changed from 16 to 0 for calls to other areas, and for international calls from 19 to 00. My conclusion is that the somewhat strange concept of two areas only made sense. Appart from the technical issues, the way how numbers changed were fairly easy to understand for the users in both cases (Paris kept its area code 1). So I am interested to see how the scheme to extend the NANP will look like :-) Dr.-Ing. Georg Roessler Mail: Georg.Roessler@de.bosch.com Bosch Telecom, Frankfurt am Main Tel./Fax.: +49-69-7505-3813/-3314 In der Theorie sind Theorie und Praxis dasselbe; in der Praxis nicht Herbert Franke ------------------------------ End of TELECOM Digest V19 #88 *****************************