Mobile phone network Orange Romania is facing right now probably the biggest mobile scam they have met since the beginning of Orange Romania.

More and more people who use the mobile phone network Orange Romania keep receiving several SMS’s such as:
“Congratulations! You have won 1000 euro’s! In order to receive your prize you must pay first a fee of 150 euro’s and you can easily do this by transferring those 150 euro’s to this phone number…”

“Reminder: Orange has noticed you have exceeded your subscriber plan. Dear X, your bill is Y euro’s (usually + 150 euro’s) but you can easily take advantage of the current offer Orange has instored for you: transfer 150 euro’s to this Z number and your extra cost will be gone.”

What did Orange Romania do about it?

The scam was all automated. The victim didn’t even have to input any numbers, how much they “should” pay but what’s even more interesting is that these messages contain the names of the actual number’s owner. So people went to Orange and asked how’s this possible and the answer was simple: this could be an inside job, an ex Orange employee might be responsible for this and the victims of this fraud can pay the extra cost in small steps each month. Now, Orange has created a fraud page (translated from Romanian to English) in which customers can prevent this kind of fraud.

This “inside job” costs people money. Even though the need for communication is increasing daily but not all people know how to make the difference between a real SMS sent by the Orange Romania system in which their customers are being informed about this month’s offer  and a spam/phishing/scam SMS where people’s money get lost based upon their innocence.

Customers of a mobile phone network should be informed more often about these frauds because this kind of scam is similar to spam and there’s nothing sympathetic about spam.

Tracing… NOT

It’s more than obvious that the number where all the money were being sent to was a PrePay number (when you’re out of calling credits, you recharge your PrePay  card).  Victims who went to notify the police about this fraud they also received a simple answer: nothing can be done.

You can’t trace (yet) a PrePay card through GPS. You can trace all calls to that number but if there’s no activity, if the spammer didn’t call anybody again there’s no lead.

Image souce, here.

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