Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!killer!vector!nobody From: wmartin@ALMSA-1.ARPA (Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: New way to donate money Message-ID: Date: 10 Jan 89 15:19:09 GMT Sender: chip@vector.UUCP Lines: 45 Approved: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-Submissions-To: telecom@bu-cs.bu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 13, message 2 Re the "moderator's note" on the subject of donating by making a phone call: This looks to have enormous potential for abuse. Someone who gets access to a company office's telephones or those of a university, say, could make hundreds of phone calls, donating thousands of dollars to their favorite cause, with no way to trace the false donations back to the real caller. Traditionally, the potential for abuse of illicit access to someone else's telephone was limited by the fact that they usually could only call other people and run up a long-distance bill, but, after the abuse was detected, such calls could be eventually charged to the called party, or the actual caller could be identified by looking at the pattern of calls or talking with some of the called parties (and threatening them with being charged for those calls, sometimes! :-). Now, with 976 numbers and other such automatically-charged services, the abuse potential went up, but was still limited by time and (probably) boredom -- after an abuser gets into an office and makes ten 976 calls, he's probably bored by it and will stop. He has no incentive to continue, unless all he wants is to attack the company, and even then it gets tiring. Now, with this new option, though, there is an incentive. He can both hurt the company and direct thousands of dollars to some cause he supports, be it "save the baby seals" or "right to life" or "planned parenthood" or The Committee To Re-Elect The President or whatever... Even though some mechanism will probably be implemented to allow "backing out" of such donations, especially if such a pattern of abuse is detected, it will still be a hassle, be after-the-fact, and not all illicit "donations" will be detected or reversed. This gives the person with a grudge an incentive to make many many many calls; he doesn't even have to wait to listen to any spiel, but can just repeatedly make calls. With an autodialer device, a determined hacker could tap into a line and run up a multi-thousand-dollar string of "donation" calls in just a few minutes, if we want to get technological about it... Maybe it still is a good idea -- as long as the only people who get donations are causes I approve of, that is... :-) Will Martin [Moderators Note: I think the answer to this is that most telcos allow blocking of 900/976 numbers, to prevent abuse of any kind, which would presumably include the abuse described by Mr. Martin. I suspect also that there would be some cancellation clause in the telco's contract with the charity, which gives the telco total recourse for uncollectibles. P. Townson]