Did a Deja search for "Mobile Phones Warning" and turned up the following.
> Just caught this little snippet -
>
> > > Subject: Mobile.Phone Fraud
> > >
Sorry Ray, load of spherical objects. Discussed
extensively in
uk.telecom.mobile and almost getting enough whiskers to
become an urban legend in its own lifetime.
Seems the latest incarnation came via Oz, though I seem
to remember seeing something similar a few years back
from the US. These from Deja. Also try
http://www.UrbanLegends.com/ and search for <mobile>.
--quote--
In article
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 13 Jul
1999 15:55:02 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED]�encroute.fr said...
>
>
> Supposedly, someone will call you on your GSM and ask
you to press
> 09# or 90# claiming it's to test your telephone.
>
> If you do this your GSM is supposed to transmit your
unique card
> number to the other party wich will then be able to use
it at your
> expence to make a copy of your card.
>
> It has, I think, all the major symptoms of a UL, it
starts by claiming
> that it's from an well known governmental office, and
ends by telling
> you to thansmit this information to as many as you
possibly can.
>
>
This has been in the UK for a while, taken seriously by
all sorts of people, finally firmly denied by the cellular
networks (only finally, some were involved for a while in
spreading it).
It's a morph of an AT&T story about pabx's being
vulnerable to a 90 scam, which had some truth behind it but then
changed to residential phones then to cellular. The first
thing I can find about it is:
A Telstra press release:
http://www.telstra.com.au/press/yr98/nov98/98111803.htm
Telstra debunks nine zero # myth
18 November, 1998
Telstra today declared that a widespread rumour that an
unathorised caller could access a customer's mobile
telephone service by asking the owner to dial 9 0 #
(hash) was a myth.
National General Manager, Mobile Networks, Mr Kevin
Phillips said, "Dialling 90# absolutely will NOT allow a third
party to access your mobile phone to make calls on your
account or otherwise to interfere with your mobile
service.
"This is the case for any Telstra service, however it is
also true for any mobile service on any network in Australia."
Mr Phillips said the urban myth appeared to have been
propagated world-wide through email and internet sources
and is likely to have started from a scam effecting
PABX's (fixed network Private Automatic Exchanges) in the USA
some years ago.
"It has no relevance to Australia or to mobile services,"
Mr Phillips said.
Media enquiries:
Anton Jones
Public Affairs Manager - NTG&M
(07) 3832 5018
0419 313 629
505/98
--end quote--
--next quote--
In article <7ik5ia$32m$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Wombat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I work for what (to spare any blushes) I will describe
as a medium sized law
> enforcement agency somewhere in the UK. Recently a
communication was put
> out on our General Orders, by the Head of
Communications, that all owners of
> mobile phones should be wary of calls from people
claiming to be working for
> their telephone company (I think Vodaphone in
particular was mentioned), and
> asking them to dial #09.
False. False, even for the sequence of buttons that the
UL is
actually about: 90#, not #09.
This story was vectored by the BBC TV programme
_Watchdog_ in a
spur-of-the-moment broadcast of something a phone-in
viewer warned them about. It is completely and utterly false
when applied to
(a) any company exchange in the UK (b) any mobile phone
equipment in the UK. We've never actually been able to
identify the model of phone exchange that this /would/
work through, anywhere in the world.
At one point, December 1998, someone at Vodaphone was
vectoring
this story as being true of the Vodaphone system. They
became
quiet very quickly and I know that, should a Vodaphone
user press that sequence during a call all they'd get is DTFM
tones.
See the thread '90# vectored on BBC TV Watchdog' and various
other threads of last year if you're interested in
reading more
about this. I don't see anything on www.urbanlegends.com or
www.snopes.com about it.
--end quote--
HTH
--
************************************************************
Ian Jennings
Microware Data Services
This post is made entirely from recycled ones and noughts
************************************************************
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