I recently received a phone bill in the mail; included within was an extra bill with charges of 177.58, from calls allegedly made to Sweden. I called the number on that bill for a company called Tellis (whom I was billed on behalf of) but the woman on the other line was unhelpful. She said the charges were made through an internet service, and indisputable. Apparently I had to click on a disclosure agreement 5 times for the charges to go through, but this obviously never happened and I hung up frustrated but resolved to get to the bottom of the problem.
It turns out that Tellis is running a scam where spyware installed on your computer dials up this number (referred to by my ISP tech guy as a 'porn dialer') and agrees to terms for you. Then these charges accrue rapidly. When I talked to the phone company they said that USBI was a third party long distance carrier, which is a normal thing, however, they are the basically the middlemen between the scam and the phone company. Any attempts to call Tellis are totally futile. Also, the phone company was not the one that created the charges, its just that the bill was added to their normal monthly bill.
When I talked to the dial-up ISP they said that this thing happens sometimes, and is the result of spyware. The way to combat it in the future is to use the Firebox browser instead of IE, download adaware and spybot from download.com, but there is no way to deal with the problem through your ISP. I am currently asking them to look through the logs of last months activity so they might pinpoint exactly what happened, but there is no promise they will find anything. The charges remain; this program hijacked my comptuer and used it to dial sweden.
This is what was recommended to me by a VERY helpful person at SBC: I refused the charges through the phone company, which means that they will be detached from my normal phone bill and sent back to Tellis; now Tellis has to bill me directly, or, if they so choose, send the charges to a collection agency. This, in turn will give time to contact the FCC and the local Utilities commission who should be informed of the scam.
The person I talked to at USBI was also very unhelpful and they claimed ignorance in the matter. An unlikely story, but as they are the middleman, and these charges *appear* to be from a valid source, they cannot take them away. Of course talking to Tellis will get you nowhere.
Be sure to let the phone company know what is going on, as well as the FCC, as well as the local utilties commision, in my case the CPUC (California Public Utilities Comission). With enough effort by people who were ripped off maybe Tellis can be shut down. Otherwise, if noone does anything, they the scam will continue. Please take action. Hopefully there is some way to get the charges removed, but that will probably only occur if a lawsuit is threatened.
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