Copyright © 1997 to 7am News
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Scam bites porn addicts.
Copyright © 1997 to 7am News |
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It's no secret that erotica and pornography are big business
on the Net. Almost every day a new "pay per view" or subscription
based picture warehouse starts up on the Web, in many cases charging
naive users to view material which has, in the first instance,
simply been downloaded from one of the many binaries newsgroups.
Well some addicts have been stung even more strongly by a scam operating from the web site at www.sexygirls.com. According to The Toronto Star, visitors to this site are offered "free nude pictures" but to gain access they download a special viewer program. When the program is downloaded and run, it silently hangs up the user's modem and forces it to instead dial a number in Moldova, a former state of the Soviet Union. In a very large percentage of cases, the naive users are unaware that they are now being charged for the equivalent of an international 0900 call and racking up a huge phone bill. The Star reports that some users have found the charges for the calls to be as high as CDN$1,200. Canadian police are investigating the operation which has its base in Scarborough and in the meantime have ordered that calls from Canada to the number in question are blocked by Canada's Telcos. Related stories:
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