Page 1 of Is there a program that shows your Internet phone number in realtime?

Well my worst fears were realised in my BT phonebill this month.

There was a premium rate billl of £45, so I assume one of my teenage sons has been on the naughty webpages, and won`t own up. (they will now split this bill between them)

I phoned up the BT customer service and was told you were lucky the bill was under a hundred pounds, as some people have been hit by thousands of pounds.

I have now taken on premium rate barring to prevent this again. You can do this by phoning customer service.

She told me that the internal speaker that makes the noise dialing (dial up) can be silenced by the premium rate dialler so you dont know, so be warned.

I did get an apology but will still have to stump up the money, and BT will make a profit out of this ripoff.

Is there any freeware program that will always show the telephone line number your connected too in realtime on your display screen, to warn you of a premium rate line change ?

BT give a free program away to help against dial up fraud
U can read about it and get it by CLICKING ME



I Cant Do Magic

This item was edited on Saturday, 11th March 2006, 19:06

May I cast a note of caution in necessarily blaming one or more of your teenage sons for this costly event. Has he/they owned up to it? or have they strenuously denied responsibility?

I only ask because exactly the same happened to me a little over a year ago. Just like you I noticed on my BT bill two premium rate calls costing an approximate total of £47. A little investigation identified the number as a premium rate pornographic website. At that time only myself and my wife, who bless her didn`t even know how to switch the computer on, had access to my computer. A little further investigation established that a small number of these obnoxious sites, if you accidentally stumble across them, can put a spyware dialer on your computer. If, then, you have/leave your computer on but not connected to dial-up, the spyware is able to dial up to their website or any other premium rate number.

My salutary lessons from all of this was to use two spyware programs namely "spybot search & Destroy" and more crucially "Spyware Blaster" which blocks them in the first place. Never leave your computer unattended and switched on for any length of time when not connected to the internet. If you have a broadband connection with a dial-up connection as a backup, only connect the dial-up cable when you need to use it.

As BT said, I also felt lucky to have got away so lightly.

Best Regards

Many thanks for those replies, will take the info on board ;)