Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom.tech
From: floyd@tanana.polarnet.com (Floyd Davidson)
Subject: Re: blocking ANI
Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 08:54:25 GMT

Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.chinet.com> wrote:
>Frank Heisler <frankie@dns.tlug.org> wrote:
>>Adam H. Kerman (ahk@chinet.chinet.com) wrote:
>
>>:Let's see, if I could use this device to set ANI to any number I like, I
>>:could bill any toll call or international call to some random number I set
>>:the device to.
>
>>There's no such device...
>
>Ah, phooey. I was looking forward to placing calls to certain dictators billed
>to phones in vulnerable politicians' offices. It would have made a great
>campaign issue.

Well, actually there is such a device.  But using it like that
would cause somebody to investigate...  And the advent of SS7
has made the real capablity of this device very hard to use.

So I guess relating a story about it and the details of how
it works isn't going to harm anyone, and it is good for giggles.

Instead of billing calls to some other account, the best use is
just don't bill anything at all!  But since SS7 now requires
billing information to be forwarded to every interested party in
the call routing process, it can't be properly used because any
significant number of calls without billing information
originating from one place will also cause an investigation.

The device of course is the toll switch which records AMA
(Automatic Message Accounting).

Yeah, yeah, that won't do most of us any good.  But in fact I
know of one small long distance company which for almost a
quarter of a century simply didn't record AMA from its own
internal PBX trunks.  The essential effect was that company
dumped its calls on AT&T with no records being keep for toll
separations.  They never paid ATT a dime for service provided.

When SS7 was implemented that practice ceased of course, and AMA
was recorded and forwarded to the appropriate destinations.  It
also happens that the first few actual telephone bills arriving
after the activation of SS7 were large enough that one company
executive got so wound up he began, get this, an internal
_fraud_ investigation within the company to find the low life
culprits who were making these phone calls!  They turned out to
be all legitimate business calls.  He lost his job over it
because advertizing your own stupidity and dishonesty is never
a good practice.

  Floyd

--
Floyd L. Davidson                                floyd@polarnet.com
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska)                  or:  floyd@barrow.com