OK so our head office has a Bell PRI connected to an Asterisk box. Our Long Distance PIC is with Telus. Its been like this for 5 years, everything is stable and working great, but then in mid-April I received 1+ calling, rated with old DDD rates, on my Bell bill for the PRI. This bill usually has no calling, except for non-1+ calls, like 411 and VSCs.
Thinking my PIC went bad, I start investigating, and indeed confirm with Telus that our PIC is intact. Checking the billing from Telus, we're collecting calls on the same days as Bell. *But wait! There's more..* The phone calls appearing on the Bell bill are not ours. It's clearly someone else's traffic! It's a whole lot of calls to electrical and plumbing supply stores all around North America, and the calling patterns are clearly business. The Bell bill contains calls from M-F 9-5. There's no weekend or after hours calls, which makes me think this isn't a hacker exploiting my PBX. And just to be sure, I did some of the obvious things to make sure I'm not being hacked.. - The Asterisk box was already not on the internet. - There are no phantom or odd SIP registrations in Asterisk. - DAHDI channel utilization (I monitor it) has not gone up since this started happening. - Logs in Asterisk don't show these calls being made. We're trying to get help from our Bell account manager [since the office's PRI is on an a wholesale account from a related/sister company], but I'm trying to figure out the technical explanation for this. Since PRI's are digital, I've only got one theory.. ..a technician at the CO accidentally programmed someone else's PRI with our same pilot billing number?!? So while their Caller Id might be different, all the traffic appears [to Bell] to come from us? My problem is.. how would the PIC not work.. shouldn't the calls get pushed over to Telus because of our PIC? Has anyone ever heard of this before? Best billing mistake ever? I've been doing telecom billing since '93. I've seen other people's calling appear on the wrong bill, but it's usually a broken association of a WTN to a Customer Account. This is someone else's calling being reported as coming from my WTN! This is going to be a fun fight.. -Marc
