Business Phone VoIP Hack - Phreaking Expensive

Bob Foreman’s architecture firm ran up a $166,000 phone bill in a single weekend last March. But neither Mr. Foreman nor anyone else at his seven-person company was in the office at the time... (hackers) routed $166,000 worth of calls from the firm to premium-rate telephone numbers in Gambia, Somalia and the Maldives...

The scheme works this way, telecommunications fraud experts say: Hackers sign up to lease premium-rate phone numbers, often used for sexual-chat or psychic lines, from one of dozens of web-based services that charge dialers over $1 a minute and give the lessee a cut...

Hackers then break into a business’s phone system and make calls through it to their premium number, typically over a weekend, when nobody is there to notice. With high-speed computers, they can make hundreds of calls simultaneously, forwarding as many as 220 minutes’ worth of phone calls a minute to the pay line...

...telecom experts advise people to turn off call forwarding and set up strong passwords for their voice mail systems and for placing international calls. (more)