There has been a lot of press coverage in my neck of the woods recently about a premium rate dial-up scam which has resulted in bills of £400+ for those unlucky enough to be caught out. From what I understand, a program downloads itself from a pop-up that won't go away unless you click "yes" to it, or else it downloads itself directly from a dubious website. It then dials out, presumably when the computer is not online and probably unattended.

The advice given in the press is to enable Call Barring for premium rate numbers but of course this is not free although it does only cost a pint of beer a month. My question is this - I have ZoneAlarm installed. Would this catch any unauthorised attempt to dial out and connect to the internet via a premium rate number?

Depends on your settings (I.e. really paranoid settings would probably alert you to internet activity from any programme but be a pain in the proverbials for normal use.) and what the dialer actually does (You pay from connection so if the dial and connect did not get picked up and it waited before opening a browser then that's potentailly x mins of charges before the browser activity triggers zone alarm.)

So i'd not rely on zone alarm to save you from this.

If you are really concerned set Zone alarm to alert on everything and be very careful about downloads and clicking on pop ups.

You don not have to click on yes to kill popo up windows CTRL + ALT + DEL and kill the appropriate task, you may need to kil all the instances of the browser if the script keeps making pop up windows. A pain but no big deal.

Of course its not a problem if you are on broadband and have the PSTN modem disconnected. Or if you are running Linux! (For me it's XP on one machine Linux on the other two.)

Advice - go Broadband

Yes, I would go broadband if I could but it's not an option at the moment as I'm 7km from the local exchange and even that doesn't get modified until March 2005. Hopefully the 10km trials that BT say they are doing will result in me be able to get broadband then.

You might also find running a spyware/adware killer in the background such as pest-patrol or ad-aware helps.

Also things such as Norton Anti-Virus pick up most of them.

I run all of these and Zone Alarm Pro and havent had any trouble.

When I've had those popup software installers that refuse to go away, I've found they eventually give up if you keep rapidly clicking "No" or "Cancel" or whatever negative. You may have to quit the browser as well.

Concur Memetic's remarks re ZoneAlarm. IIRC, ZA doesn't check which dialler does the dialling, it just checks which prog is causing data to flow on the connection, once the connection is made. You would already have given your browser the necessary permissions in ZA, so when this foreign dialler made the browser connect to its devious site, ZA would let it.

AA

Well, my BT phone bill came in today and as I feared I've been hit by this scam - fortunately only for a couple of minutes at £1.50 per minute....not as bad as some locals up here who have been hit for £400+.

Hope the following is of help to UK dial-up users......I thought that Premium Rate Call Barring was a chargeable BT service but it is not - as long as you have dialling out to Premium Rate numbers permanently barred. The bar becomes active within an hour of requesting it on 0800-800-150.

If you want to be able to switch the service on and off yourself then it is chargeable under their Calling Features scheme. If you use the free service then you have to give seven days notice of wanting the bar deactivated.

If you get hit like me then let the regulatory watchdog ICSTIS have the details on 0800-500-212, although it seems permanently engaged, or contact them on their website http://www.icstis.org.uk where you can complain and they will get back to you after they have investigated. From the list on the ICSTIS site, the number my computer dialled out was to an "adult" content site.