Big Col

Hello

Got my phone bill this morning which included one unknown call costing £16 quid to a premium number. Phoned BT who say it was made on the 23rd December at approx 22:00. The BT operator was unable to give me anymore info 'due to the data protection act' however he did say he recognised it as a website phone number and suggested it was my PC that dialled it.

i'm using ZoneAlarmPro and regularly scan my PC with Spybot and Adaware. All scans show system is clean.

Anyone got any ideas on how to find out what dialled the number and how to prevent it happening again? (yes I usually pull the cable out the phone socket when not in use)

I'm using win98SE. Does this have an event viewer like XP where I could maybe view if anything was installed around that time?

Any advice much appreciated.

Colin (£16 worse off )

lightning101

Get cable broadband - doesn't use a phone line. So can't dial.

Big Col

not available in my area

deano555

Colin, I got stung for £57 on my last months ntl bill and yes I did have to pay it. My culprit was a dialler on my system which I was unaware of. Oftel said they get upto 15 calls a day on this computer fraud and most are quarterly calls running into hundreds of pounds. I have since replaced my pc and have installed firewalls etc. adaware and spybot found about 6 diallers on my old system. I have also paid £1 a month to block premium numbers. Thing that really p1ssed me off was that oftel said that ntl knew of this scam, but they were convinced that I had been accessing "premium sites", even when I was at work and my wife had been on the computer.
I have also complained to a company called ictis who regulate premium numbers but I don't think I will see any cash back, I reckon most of these scum bag operators are based abroad.

hope this helps Deano.

Scooby-Doo

You have probably got a program called "Dialler" installed that will cut off your existing ISP connection and dial a premium number. Zonealarm will not stop this product, have seen it loads of times but it cannot find a modem on my PC so errors appear. Try searching then PC and registry for "Dialler" or search the net for info.

Have you been surfing ****

Big Col

does a fish have a waterproof head?

Seriously, cheers for the ideas but I can't find any trace of what dialled it. I can only assume I maybe detected it and dealt with it at the time but can't remember. Searching for 'dialler' only shows stuff related to my proper Freeserve dialler. I realise ZAPro wouldn't have stopped it but I thought it should of displayed the small window asking permission fro this dialler to connect to the internet.

DaveMiddleton

There is a great program called "hijack this" which dealt very quickly with simialar type of problem. Think it then asks you to save log and get someone on "spywareinfo.com" (I think) to advise what to remove.