When Whakatane couple Nicole and Danis Mazar received a $1200 phone bill from Telecom they each thought the other had been making a lot of toll calls.
But on closer inspection there were calls, totalling $500, to Tuvalu and Tokelau that neither had made.
The Mazars then discovered they had fallen victim
to a sophisticated phone scam called "Trojan" dialling.
When Mrs Mazar contacted Telecom about her bill, she was told she had a Trojan dialler on her computer.
Trojan diallers are programs that people unwittingly download into their computers when using the internet. The programs then dial up either 0900 or overseas numbers.
Pop-ups or advertisements that appear while surfing the internet sometimes have dial-up software hidden in them. Buttons may be mislabelled so when the user clicks "close", they actually accept the function.
Mrs Mazar said Telecom told them they would have to pay their bill, regardless..
"Telecom is threatening to cut it off, but we do not have the money to pay for a phone bill that is not ours," Mrs Mazar said. "I am a nurse and we cannot afford to be without the phone."
Telecom corporate communications officer Helen Isbister said if it could be shown that the customer had been tricked into downloading the software, then Telecom would look at whether the Mazars had to pay the bill.
Consumers Institute chief executive David Russell said telecommunications companies should pay for the cost of the calls rather than expect customers to pay for a service they did not know they were using.
- NZPA
