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VoIP Service Provider Accused Of Stealing Calls |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 08 June 2006 |
An American VoIP Service Provider stands accused of stealing
PSTN connections in a scam that netted more than a US$1million from an
investment of US$20,000 in hacking charges.
According to a report by the Seattle
Post-Inteligencer, investigators allege the 23 year old Venezuelan man, now
a resident in Miami
cheated VoIP service providers of interconnect fees for hundreds of thousands
of IP-based telephone calls.
It is alleged he paid a professional hacker to penetrate the
networks of other VoIP Service Providers some of which lost up to US$300,000. Edwin
Andres Pena was able to keep in excess of US$1 million in fees collected from
his customers as he didn't have to pay the 15 other providers for the calls
made.
Prosecutors allege that the scam routed some half a million
IP-based phone calls through one service provider alone. That particular service provider was identified in the court
documents only as "N.T.P.," suggesting that the victim may be
Net2Phone, the company currently suing Skype for Patent Infringement. Neither Net2Phone
nor its parent company IDT Corp., were available for comment.
Pena was making so much money he was forced to spend up
large to hide his illegal profits adding several pieces of real estate, three
luxury cars and a 40-foot motor boat to his portfolio. Federal agents
reportedly confiscated a customized 2004 BMW M3 form the acused.
Pena set himself up as a wholes VoIP service provider using
two companies which sold more than 10 million minutes of Internet telephone
service at discounted rates as low as US$0.4 cents a minute.
But rather than pay for those calls to be routed through
legitimate channels, Pena paid the hacker to locate vulnerable ports at
unsuspecting non-phone companies around the world by sending more than 6
million scans over four months in 2005.
Once this network was established, the
scammers used "brute force" attacks to identify the codes used by the
providers to determine if the calls from the unsuspecting intermediaries were authorised
on their network.
This was done simply by sending countless test calls to see
which codes were accepted. The intermediaries were then programmed to use the reverse
engineered codes to route the calls of his customers. Or so the allegation
goes.
If Pena is found guilty of wire fraud he could face up to 20
years in prison and a $250,000 fine. The computer hacking penalty is up to five
years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
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