Feds Bust Major VoIP ScamDuo made millions off of hacked VoIP deal ( old news - 09:31AM Thursday Jun 08 2006) tags: legal · VoIPThe New York Times is running an interesting story on two men who operated an Internet voice scheme that netted them more than a million in connection fees. It began with the men starting two smaller VoIP companies, and buying wholesale voice access. "Instead of buying access to other networks to connect his clients' calls, Mr. Pena paid about $20,000 to Robert Moore, the man arrested in Spokane, to create "what amounted to 'free' routes by surreptitiously hacking into the computer networks" of unwitting Internet phone providers, and then routing his customers' calls over those providers' systems, according to the federal complaint. The scam left more than 15 Internet phone companies with connectivity bills up to $300,000 each, without any revenue to show for it.
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 indysz
Premium
join:2003-07-26
Valparaiso, IN | Nice Well we do honor creativity in America =)
P.S. Im the first comment! | |
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tomkb
Premium
join:2000-11-15
Avon, OH
clubs: | Re: Nice Seems like crime is just an alternate avenue for some businesses nowadays.
You have marketing
You have sales
You have technology
and than you have crime | |
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batterup
I Can Not Tell A Lie.
Premium
join:2003-02-06
Netcong, NJ
clubs: | All your VoIP belong to us. | |
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tomkb
Premium
join:2000-11-15
Avon, OH
clubs: | business plan Sounds like there business plan may have needed a little editting. | |
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knightmb
Everybody Lies
join:2003-12-01
Franklin, TN | Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? Sounds like the guy should have been smart and just made a real business out of it rather than steal and come up with $700,000 still. | |
| | achuchma
join:2001-04-11
Tampa, FL
| Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? said by knightmb  :Sounds like the guy should have been smart and just made a real business out of it rather than steal and come up with $700,000 still. Per the news story, the $300k was what the victimized companies had to pay.
The thief is the one that walked away with the $1M.
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Camelot One
Premium,MVM
join:2001-11-21
Sarasota, FL
clubs:
| Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? I think what he was saying though is that the "thief" brought in $1M, and even though he stole from the other companies $300k worth of service, it was only $300k in costs versus $1m income.
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AMD X2 4800+ @2700Mhz/ MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum SLI/ 4x 1024Mb Corsair XMS PC4000/ WD 74Gb Raptor/ PNY 7800GTs SLI/ Antec 550 True Control/Custom water cooler | |
| | | | mierwins
join:2004-03-18
Montgomery, IL | Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? Is it just me or does a $300,000 theft of services not seem like a "Major VoIP Scam"? | |
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insomniac84
join:2002-01-03
Schererville, IN | He stole $300,000 from 15 companies.
300,000 * 15 = $4,500,000. So clearly there was no money to be made. A legit company would have had a net loss of 3.5 million dollars. | |
| | | | | mierwins
join:2004-03-18
Montgomery, IL | Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? Ok, but it also says "up to" and the media ALWAYS uses the biggest number to spin it into a headline. Some probably had fees of a few thousand but they don't tell you that part. Still doesn't seem so "Major" to me. | |
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Michieru2
zzz zzz zzz
Premium
join:2005-01-28
Miami, FL | Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? Major from a consumer stand point yes, not major from a business point of view if you are a medium to large business. Will seem pretty steep for a small business.
Either way money is money and that's enough to buy a few Hummers. | |
| | | | Necronomikro
join:2005-09-01
| You're probably right. Of the 15, some probably had fees totalling a few thousand, and a few 10's of thousands and only one or two with 100's of thousands, still, that's probably at least $400,000 of money lost to those companies, and $1,000,000 gained for a duo. | |
| | | | | Skippy25
join:2000-09-13
Hazelwood, MO
| Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? Not a single one of you guys have deciphered this word problem very accurately.
"more than a million" could be 1,000,000.01 or it could be 10,000,000,000.00
"up to 300,000" could be $1 for 14 and 300,000 for one.
Until the actual facts are presented somewhere we can do nothing more then speculate and show our inabilities to decipher a simple english paragraph.
How much they made is irrelevant, the point is they stole it. The amount they stole is relevant as it will determine the severity of the crime. But being that it was on the internet crossing state bounds it is a federal crime anyway so....... | |
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dogma
Premium
join:2002-08-15
Boulder City, NV
| Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? One man's "criminal" is another's "Multi-Billionaire captain of technology"
Didn't Apple computer start in the same fashion? A "criminal" hacker named Steve "Woz" Wozniak and his "criminal" CEO buddy Steve Jobs built and sold boxes that could steal voice minutes from the phone company AT&T?
said by Wozniak Bio :
Around this time, Fernandez introduced Woz to his best friend and classmate, Steve Jobs. Jobs, an ambitious "loner" who "always had a different way of looking at things," quickly befriended Woz, and they started working together.
Wozniak matriculated at the University of California, Berkeley. He learned about the "blue box" through an October 1971 article in Esquire Magazine written by Ron Rosenbaum that led to an introduction to the leading "phone phreak" interviewed in the article, John Draper (a.k.a. Cap'n Crunch). The blue box was the basic tool of phone phreaking, a device with which one could (mis)use the telephone system by emulating signaling tones used by analog phone switches of the day to obtain free long-distance calls and explore the system. Unfazed by the trouble with the law that Draper and others in the article faced, Wozniak built and Jobs sold blue boxes for $150 apiece, splitting the profits.
That's the way I decipher this simple english paragraph. | |
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phattieg
join:2001-04-29
Winter Park, FL
 ·Verizon Wireless B..
·Sprint Mobile Broa..
| Re: Made $1,000,000 but cost them $300,000? This is so true. The invention of the Blue Box started off as a tape recorded sample of the tones you were trying to dial with, then someone got the bright idea that you could get voltage to occilate at certain frequencies, and you could mimic single and dual multitone frequency emitted by the analog switches of that era. I wish so bad I grew up in that era, but NOOOO, I had Atari and Nintendo to mess with. 26 years later, I run my OWN VoIP soft switch, and let me tell you, I have encountered some backdoors for free calls myself. So to say this guy "deserves" any kind of punishment is just like saying the companies affected should also be investigated and sued for mishandling telecommunications at the PSTN level, since the fraud terminated thru their softswitch to a wired circuit. They should be more "in the know" about call transactions going thru their "new" technology. On my switch, once ever 2 days I check the CDR (call detail records to noobs) by call time frequency "to see if someone is tinkering or trying illegal sip registrations". I also do a random monitor/spy option to cycle thru all active channels to ensure nobody is stuck in a loop. I say there should be a financial forcast specified for the folks who manage these kinds of tasks, and thus, they could hire a new person per every "X" number of monitored circuits. Costs money, but also reduces money and eliminates people doing things they shouldn't be able to. In the end, it would save them money. But, who cares, it's not my wallet, so they can suffer. I hope there are a million more holes left unpatched, because SIP protocal can use more. I love how each revision of the SIProtocal is backwards compatable, and open source. Anyhow, HAHAHA to the idiot VoIP providers for their mistake. Boo hoo. Seriously though, have Asterisk, try sipphone.com for your inbound DID's. Cheapest price, but never an issue with termination. They just have sucky voicemail, which I don't use, because I have Asterisk. Take care all...
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SIPPhone/Gizmo # 17476200648 / Ran by Asterisk & Slackware 10.1. | |
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