What’s up with the spam telephone calls?!

At Infinity Dental Web we offer call tracking and recording service to all our clients, because it offers a better measurement of the website conversions. However, over the past few weeks we’ve noticed numerous clients receiving calls from fax machines. After further investigation, we have learned that these appear to be spam calls made by phone hackers.

You may want to take immediate action if you’re getting a lot of calls lately and if on the other end there is silence or music, you’re getting a lot of dropped calls from mobile phones, or if you’re getting calls from fax machines. This could mean that your office phone system is being targeted by criminal hackers. International, organized crime has been targeting office phone systems in order to sell overseas calling services at your expense. Phone hacking is on the rise due a low risk in being caught minimal punishment for the crime.

If you are getting an influx of bogus calls as described, your number could be a target of what is called a ‘war dialer,’ which is a computerized system that will repeatedly dial your telephone number. Its goal is to dial numbers in sequence until it finds an automated attendant. Once it finds one, the system will make repetitive calls to that number to generate dual-tone multi-frequency (dtmf) signaling for the purpose of accessing your phone system. If hackers gain access to your phone system, they can reprogram it for outbound overseas calls at your expense. Most people don’t realize their phone systems have been hacked until they receive a shockingly high phone bill in the mail. Unfortunately, these charges are much too difficult to dispute, because the phone carrier cannot determine which calls are illegitimate.

Another reason for this call spamming could be if someone is trying to generate phone leads and rule out dead telephone lines. Nevertheless, you should still be cautious if you have been getting these types of calls recently by taking these precautions listed below:

• Do not use default passwords on your phone systems.
• Change your passwords to make them more difficult.
• Block out access to international and operator services with your carrier.
• If you have extensions and mailboxes that are no longer being used, shut them down.
• Don’t use external call-forwarding from mailboxes.
• Is your PBX system modem or Web-accessible? If so, protect your administrative ports.

Our action is to monitor all of our clients’ call tracking numbers and work closely with the call tracking service until they come up with a plan to prevent further spammed calls. Clients that have been targeted will be credited for the bogus calls as well.

At Infinity Dental Web, we pride ourselves in taking care of our customers. In fact, we often tell our clients to leave the worrying to us when it comes to their websites. Then they can concentrate on taking care of their patients. If you would like to learn more about our worry-free websites, come by for a visit. Start by checking out our SEO services.