Phone Scam Charge Rocks HP
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Former board member Tom Perkins alleges the computer giant hired consultants to pose as himself and other board members to fraudulently obtain private phone records. By Kim Zetter
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Investigators working on behalf of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) masqueraded as telecom employees to obtain phone records of Verizon Communications (VZ) customers, BusinessWeek has learned.
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The California attorney general expects to file charges against people at Hewlett-Packard Co and other companies in relation to the 'pretexting' scandal at HP, in which HP paid investigators who hacked the phone records of its directors and several journalists.
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A service is accused of $200 million in false charges for dishonest online sellers and telemarketers.
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Fake phone contest scandal resurfaces with another alleged case of viewer deception.
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(InfoWorld) - Verizon Wireless Inc. has sued Hewlett-Packard Co.'s (HP's) private investigators for faking their identities to obtain other people's phone records, a practice known as "pretexting." In a case filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, Verizon asked a judge to award it damage payments and to block the defendants from gaining any more records. Verizon said it did not know the investigators' identities, but defined them as "John and Jane Does" who were retained by HP in 2005 and 2006 to investigate confidential information leaks from HP's board of directors, according to the lawsuit. Those people obtained private information about Verizon Wireless customers by using pretexting calls to gain access to the company's protected computers and data storage facilities. They then sold that information. Both actions violate the national Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, Verizon said. The scandal has already forcedÂ Patricia Dunn to resign as HP board chairman, andÂ sparked investigations by the California attorney general and the U.S. House of Representatives. In court papers, Verizon described how a woman called Verizon customer service on May 17, 2005, asking to see phone records for an HP director. She called back three days later, arranging to block text messages to that phone and logging on to the person's online account. Then, on Feb. 1, 2006, someone called Verizon customer service again, asking for the number of a second phone on that account. Later that day, the person logged into the account again and changed the password, this time from a computer with a different IP (Internet Protocol) address. The next day, someone called Verizon and asked to see call records of the director's spouse. Verizon workers grew suspicious and placed a warning on the account. Someone called again on March 1, offered the spouse's Social Security number and asked for the mobile phone number. Already wary, Verizon workers called the mobile phone and found that the customer's voicemail did not match the caller's voice. When someone tried again to access the records on March 14, Verizon workers refused. Verizon hopes the lawsuit will help restore its customers' confidence in the security of their records, saying that its reputation has been harmed by the spying. "Verizon goes to great lengths to protect confidential customer information," including training its customer service representatives to identify the schemes used by illegal data brokers, the suit said. Despite those precautions, the HP investigators used "fraud, trickery and deceit" by making pretexting calls to Verizon representatives to gain unauthorized online account access, the suit alleges. Verizon said it will update the suit once it learns their identities. Â ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) agreed to a US$14.5 million settlement in the California civil lawsuitÂ related to the company's spying scandal. Under terms of the settlement with the California attorney general, HP will pay $13.5 million to create a "Privacy and Piracy Fund" for law enforcement activities related to privacy and intellectual property rights operated in the state Attorney General's Office. The company will also pay $650,000 in civil penalties and $350,000 to cover expenses of the investigation, California Attorney General Bill Lockyer announced Thursday afternoon. HP executives and private investigators retained by the company still face criminal charges in the scandal, which involves the alleged use of "pretexting," or pretending to be someone to obtain their personal phone records.
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(InfoWorld) - An Internet business that sold people's telephone and credit-card records has agreed to settle charges that it violated U.S. law, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said Thursday. Integrity Security & Investigation Services and its owner, Edmund Edmister, will give up $2,700, the entire amount the company earned from selling phone records and credit card transaction reports, the FTC said. The settlement also bars the company from obtaining and selling confidential phone and credit account records unless authorized by law or court order. The FTC in MayÂ filed federal court complaintsÂ against five Web-based operations allegedly engaged in pretexting, attempting to obtain phone or other personal records from companies by pretending to be the targeted customer. Integrity Security & Investigation Services is the first firm to settle with the FTC; charges are still pending against the four remaining companies. The U.S. Congress has beenÂ investigating pretextingÂ since early this year, but the practice gained national attention last month whenÂ Hewlett-Packard officials revealedÂ pretexting had been used to gain access to the phone records of employees, board members and journalists. Private investigators employed by HP allegedly used pretexting in an investigation of board leaks in 2005 and 2006. The agency dismissed charges against F. Lynne Moseley and Tracey Edmister, Integrity Security & Investigation Services corporate officers. The FTC determined they played no role in operating the business.
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Plus: Google apps for your site, and HP's pretexting debacle.
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Cell phone customers are unhappy with unexpected charges for everything from roadside assistance to new handsets--and they're calling their lawyers to complain.
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(InfoWorld) - On Monday evening, my wife reached me on my mobile phone. She was spending a long weekend with her family in Maine. "I've called our home phone several times," she said. "And I keep getting a busy signal." That night, I didn't think twice about the phone problem. We have been VoIP customers for more than a year, and flaky service has been standard operating procedure. I reset my VoIP converter box and crossed my fingers. Then, on Tuesday, when the problems persisted, I called my VoIP provider, SunRocket, and got the message that the company was no longer taking tech support and sales calls. That's not good. Many free-market analysts and large telecom providers have hailed this as a new era of competition. It's a wonderful new world where your VoIP provider can cut off your home phone service without warning. This week, SunRocket went belly up without any communication to its 200,000 customers. SunRocket had been providing both my home and my home office phone service. I could charitably say that phone service since Monday evening has been intermittent. In reality, phone service has been mostly dead with occasional spurts of dial tone. Now, when business associates try to call my home office, they get either a busy signal, or they get one ring and a hang-up. I'm trying to switch my home and office numbers to Vonage, but they say it could take up to 10 days for the switch to happen. When I first heard about SunRocket more than a year ago, it seemed like a good solution to large monthly telephone bills. The local incumbent phone service was charging about $60 a month for unlimited local and long distance. SunRocket offered unlimited local andÂ long distance and even some international calling for $199 a year. The company also offered a second out-of-area-code phone number at no cost. That feature caught my eye because my home office is in suburban Maryland, but most of the people who call me are located in Washington, D.C. My wife and I looked at a savings of more than $500 a year and decided it was time to check out VoIP. The switch was not without problems. Voice quality was spotty at best, particularly when we were talking to someone on a mobile phone. For months, we had problems with frequently dropped calls. We soon became quite familiar with the "not-my-fault" phenomenon. SunRocket blamed the problems on Comcast, our broadband provider. Comcast, of course, blamed SunRocket. (Comcast: We can't guarantee quality of service for third-party applications. By the way, why don't you switch to our voice over IP service -- it only costs double what you're paying now.) After months of experimenting with equipment configuration, we finally got most of the problems ironed out. When it came time to renew our annual subscription, we had mixed feelings, but SunRocket was still significantly cheaper that most alternatives. We paid $199 for a year of service in March. In late June, in a sign of things to come, SunRocket laid off about a quarter of its workforce. The way I look at it, someone owes us about nine months of phone service, but we're not holding our breath. Now, in some ways, this is just a story about a couple hundred thousand VoIP customers who saw their phone service go dead without warning. But there's a larger context here. During the last couple of years, some telecom analysts, free-market think tanks, and telecom carriers have trumpeted a new era of competition. Their argument: Old, monopoly-style regulations aren't needed any more because there's all kinds of competition out there. They say that telecom carriers shouldn't have to share their networks with competitors and broadband providers shouldn't be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors because there's all kinds of competition out there. Meanwhile, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, has shut down. Vonage, the largest independent VoIP provider, has faced a patent infringement lawsuit from giant competitor Verizon, and its future is uncertain. Verizon contends it owns the patent to the technology that translates VoIP calls and allows them to connect to traditional telephone networks. Wireless phone carriers provide some competition, but the largest two wireless carriers are owned by the two giant telecom carriers. I'm not sure that counts as competition. In the broadband space, there are some indications that one or two new competitors are on the way, but it could take years. Right now, well over 90 percent of the U.S. has at most two broadband providers, the cable company or the telecom carrier. The telecom carriers are fighting against auction rules that would encourage a new broadband provider when a chunk of television spectrum is freed up in early 2009. Elsewhere, broadband customers in other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pay less for faster service. Japanese customers pay about one-seventh what U.S. customers do per megabit of bandwidth. But few people in D.C. want to talk about the real reasons for this. It's not free-market competition; instead, telecom services in many other countries are highly regulated and subsidized by the government. For some of us, the promise of telecom competition seems a long way off. And, by the way, if you want to find me during the next week, your best bet is probably e-mail.
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Pay up or you'll never see your data again Pond-dwelling scammers have developed a new cyber-extortion ruse.â¦
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Company that used pretexting to obtain and sell phone records and credit card information gives up ill-gotten gains.
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Cingular Wireless LLC, the nation's largest cell phone provider, on Friday sued a private eye caught up in the scandal over the Hewlett-Packard Co. leak investigation, seeking to make him pay for allegedly obtaining customer call records under false pretenses.
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Let's not get civil HP will pay $14.5m to keep California prosecutors from filing civil charges against the company and its directors - both current and former.â¦
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Frustrated by sub-par, outsourced customer service and technical support? Would you be willing to pay a premium for onshore service?
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Contractor charged with defrauding the company of $10 million. Also: Mass. man allegedly uses false identities to order parts.