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From: erik@naggum.uu.no (Erik Naggum)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Forwarded Calls and CallerID
Message-ID: <15233@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 5 Dec 90 17:20:28 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 866, Message 9 of 9


Recently there has been much discussion about a prank with forwarded
calls, and several very complex theories of why it works have been
forwarded.  I may be missing something, but isn't the point as simple
as this:

    -	Prankster, A, forwards his calls to random third party, C
    -	Prankster calls someone, B
    -	B return*call prankster, A, _which_forwards_to_C_

Seems so obvious to me.  Also reminds me of a couple nice stories from
when "new services" came to Oslo.  Norway uses the CEPT standard for
function invocation, and therein lies part of the fun.  To order
waking or some other ringing at some later time, dial *55*HHMM#.

Interestingly, a lot of people dialled *55*0700#, but all the ads for
the new services didn't say anything about where this was available,
except that you needed touch-tone phones, that * should break the dial
tone, etc, so a huge number of people actually called 550700, a
grocery store at the ground floor of a compartment building.  The
owner was hard of hearing, and had the phone ring out LOUD!  Hundreds
of users called this number after people went to bed in this building,
every night.  I have no idea how it all ended, but this made it to the
newspapers, who were very anti-new-technology, as expected.

Another fun thing was to use this with call forwarding, which is
enabled with *21*number#.  Here's how to do it: Order waking with *55*
for some very inconvenient time, and forward your calls to someone you
don't like very much.  Be sure to enable the forwarding at a time no
one will call you.  No more than two months went by before the waking
service was redefined to override call forward.

Now, the third fun thing with call forwarding was related to me.  Call
forwarding is free in Norway, and thus is limited to certain local
areas, the pager service, and stuff like that.  (Forwarding your call
to the time of day service is a nice hint to people who call you too
late at night...)  Bugs in the software happen every now and then, so
at a place outside Oslo, call forwarding outside your local calling
area was enabled, but the forwarder payed for the non-local call.
This was also true for payphones.  

So, the bright young telephone users discovered that they could
forward calls from payphones to BBS'es all over the world, and then go
home and call the payphone.  Voila.  (Although it took me almost two
hours on the phone, this incident was confirmed by a telco rep, who
insisted on calling me back before telling me anything.  He said it
was one of the more serious blunders they had made, but declined to
give any indication of the extent of lost revenue.  They would not
attempt to find out who did it, since they couldn't prove who had
called.)


[Erik Naggum]
Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway