Jagex’s MMO RuneScape allows players to pay for subscriptions via several methods including by credit card and by calling a telephone number, receiving a PIN, and having the membership added to their phone bill. But the subscription-by-phone method has become the target of a police investigation after dozens of Telstra customers were wrongly billed during a two week period last month.
Although Telstra, an Australian telecommunications company, has refused to release the findings of their investigation, news source The Herald is reporting that hundreds of phone calls, billed at $13.97 per call, were made from numbers starting with 4963. It is believed that the phone calls were made using equipment that can spoof CallerID numbers, and Telstra is in the process of contacting affected customers.
Unfortunately, systems like Surfpin rely on the CallerID number to know who to bill, which has become increasingly easy to spoof in recent years.
I will have more on this as it appears.
(Source: The Herald)
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