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Although many scams involve the use of telephones to contact or extract information from potential victims, a few varieties of fraud target telephone service itself as a means of obtaining ill-gotten revenue from unsuspecting prey. One common variety of telephone service fraud involves obtaining information or employing trickery that allows the scammer to place long-distance calls and bill them to someone else (as in the #-9-0 scam), and another common variety involves duping consumers into running up hefty fees on their own telephone bills (as in the 809 area code scam). In December 2005, many UK residents were targets of the latter variety of scam, one that attempted to lure them into placing calls to a premium rate number and keep them on the line for several minutes. (Premium rate or pay-per-call numbers typically generate revenue by providing information or entertainment in exchange for a per-minute fee, which is billed to the caller's phone number. Such services are commonly known as 900 numbers in North America and 090 numbers in the UK, although other prefixes may be used as well.) The bait for this scam was the distribution of official-looking postcards bearing the name Parcel Delivery Services (PDS) to residences, each card proclaiming that a package was awaiting delivery (usually one said to contain a digital camera) and that the recipient needed to call PDS to obtain a security confirmation code to effect delivery of the parcel. What many consumers failed to notice (or heed), however, was the small print on the card informing them that the phone number provided was a premium rate number with a whopping £1.50 per-minute fee. As the BBC Wales X-Ray consumer investigation service found when they placed a call to the PDS number: Not surprisingly, investigators failed to turn up any complainants who actually received digital cameras from PDS, and PhonePayPlus (formerly the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information, aka ICSTIS), the group that oversees premium rate services in the UK, removed access to the service (which was using up to 20 different phone numbers) on 29 December 2005. (PDS was run through Studio Telecom, a service provider registered in Belize, which had previously been fined and barred by PhonePayPlus for using misleading direct mail promotions to generate calls to their service.) Because the Internet-circulated warning did not just up and go away in December 2005 once the problem was sreolved, people continued to spread the alert in e-mail, prompting PhonePayPlus to add an explanation to their web site in October 2007 (and again in updated forms in October 2009 and November 2010): Although the specific warning e-mail reproduced at the head of this page is out of date, it represents a common form of telephone fraud that has been used in the past and will likely be used again, so the public is well advised to be aware of it. UK telephone customers who find unexpected premium rate charges on their phone bills can obtain more information by looking up the associated phone numbers via the number checking facility on the PhonePayPlus web site, and they can file complaints about premium rate services through PhonePayPlus' online complaint form. U.S. residents can file complaints about premium rate services through an online form available on the web site of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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