Source: Wired News
By: Lynn Burke
Like an increasing number of scammed surfers, Loding, by clicking through an agreement attached to a movie he wanted to download, inadvertently took with it a piece of software that reset his modem and dialed a number in Chad, a country in central Africa.
The program, dirtymovies.exe, came with an agreement, which Loding clicked through without reading. "I don’t know if I was drunk or whatever, I thought it was just some sort of privacy agreement," he said.
Drunk or not, he’s still responsible for the charges, attributed to two mysterious 31-minute calls to Chad.
AT&T spokeswoman Lee Ann Kuster said the company has received a significant number of complaints about these kinds of charges, "enough to get our attention and put it on our radar screen," she said.
AT&T even issued a customer warning last week about it. But while the company feels its customers’ pain, it still wants to get paid.
"The bottom line is that customers are responsible for the calls made from their home. The charges are sustained," she said.
But $357?
"Why does an adult movie have to be downloaded from Chad?" Loding wants to know. "It doesn’t make sense to me at all. I think maybe it’s some deal with the phone company."
He might be right. The desolate, landlocked country, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the world, has a very primitive telecommunications system. And it doesn’t make a lot of money from it. So striking a deal with a U.S.-based Internet company, adult in nature or not, may not seem like such a bad idea.
A spokesman at the Embassy for the Republic of Chad in Washington said the country’s government had never heard of these telephone calls, and offered no further comment.
In fact, it was difficult to find out anything from anyone who might be involved or responsible.
A spokesman from Adultbuffet.com who would only identify himself as "Brad" said his company was not responsible for the charges Loding received, because the link he clicked on was owned by another site. Adultbuffet, he said, is simply a collection of other adult sites.
Adultbuffet is registered to All World Creations, a company that filed for a license in Atlanta as a book dealer. According to the county business office, the company is not operating with a license in Atlanta, and neither All World Creations nor Adultbuffet have filed papers with the Georgia Secretary of State.
On Wednesday, the page on the site that contains the movie Loding downloaded was registered to Abovenet, a San Jose, California-based bandwidth provider that said it provided services to Nonstopnet, a Walnut Creek, California, company.
Nonstopnet spokeswoman Johnette Stubbs said her company had nothing to do with Adultbuffet.com, and shifted the blame to Skyhosting.com, the company she says really hosts Adultbuffet.com. "We have nothing to do with their site at all," she said.
Skyhosting.com appears to be closely affiliated with Nonstopnet, according to information posted on its own website and filed with Network Solutions.
Minutes after denying a relationship, Stubbs called back to say she had just spoken with Skyhosting and "they are no longer hosting Adultbuffet."
Lynn Macias, another Nonstopnet spokeswoman, said when the company learned of Skyhosting’s affiliation with Adultbuffet, it was dropped. "I think that’s unbelievable that they were running that," she said. "We had no idea they were running that little scam, that’s not within our business model."
By Thursday afternoon, the site had been picked up by Hitter Communications, an ISP in Hernando, Florida. But a call to Andrew Cook, the registered contact at Hitter, revealed that he was no longer with the company. Company officials said they would act immediately to discharge the site from their control.
Now the only company left that will admit to hosting the adult smorgasbord known as Adultbuffet is Flying Crocodile, a Seattle company that hosts 60,000 adult sites.
Flying Crocodile CEO Andrew Edmond said Adultbuffet isn’t doing anything wrong, and said about 15-20 percent of the adult sites out there are now using dialers as an alternative payment. Dialers, he said, represent anywhere from a $60-110 million business annually. They’re a natural solution to the problem of online credit card fraud.
"The majority of people use dialers ethically," he said.
The dialing companies are a very secretive lot that do not advertise themselves, but instead approach companies on an individual basis.
The company behind Adultbuffet’s dialer appears to be the No Credit Card Network, owned by Celtline Holdings based in Dublin, Ireland.
Edmond says the dialer companies choose countries like Chad because there are not enough incoming phone calls to make that country’s phone carriers any money.
"People in Chad love talking to people all around the globe, but no one seems to like calling anyone in Chad," Edmond said. "There’s not enough incoming calls. It’s a trade deficit on a telecommunications level."
The online adult industry is only too happy to step in and help out. Of course, Edmond said the adult sites receive about 80 percent of the revenue generated by the long-distance phone calls to Chad. Chad gets the other 20 percent.
"In the early days we were made to look very, very, very bad," Edmond said. "We want to bring value to the industry."
Also doing its bit to bring value to the $1.8 billion industry is Babenet.com, a company based in Beverly Hills, California that owns hundreds of adult websites.
Several customers have linked a dialing program, called FreeSex_live.exe, back to Babenet.
Laurie Swenson of Crookston, Minnesota, said she ended up with FreeSex_live.exe by leaving her 13-year-old son alone with the computer. She only discovered that he had downloaded the dialing software when she logged onto the Internet and found that her home page, search engine, and email signature had been hijacked by a site called GoHip.com.
Another user who wished to remain anonymous said he "was cruising the curious path, you know, the ‘free passwords’ sites" when he ended up with GoHip all over his computer and FreeSex_live.exe in his hard drive.
GoHip.com and Babenet.com are both hosted by Alchemy Communications. Alchemy Communications once featured GoHip.com at the top of its "featured clients" page, but has since removed all traces of the company from its site.
Calls to Babenet’s president, Nolan Quan, were not returned. But Robert Gould, a spokesman for Alchemy, GoHip, and Babenet, said he had never heard of the freesex_live.exe program, and kept a close eye on Babenet. "I watch what they do and how they do it," he said. "If Babenet was doing that, I would certainly have a problem."
A problem, but probably not of the illegal sort. Adult sites are within their legal rights to slip whatever they want onto a user’s computers, as long as they provide a written warning that must be clicked through.
Before opening either AdultBuffet’s dirtymovies.exe or Babenet’s freesex_live.exe programs, a user must click through an agreement that essentially relieves everyone of liability other than the customer. If the user scrolls through the small dialogue box, he’ll see examples of rates that customers might expect to pay.
For freesex_live.exe, the "agreement" says, U.S. users might see a bill to Vanuatu, a tax haven comprised of 83 islands in the South Pacific, at $5.09 per minute. Dirtymovies.exe users are told their calls to Chad cost between $2.57-7.31 per minute.
This is not the first time adult entertainment companies on the Internet have tried the re-routing trick. In 1997, the FTC clamped down on the operators of three sites – www.sexygirls.com, www.1adult.com, and www.beavisbutthead.com for redirecting the modems of their customers to dialup Moldova, a former Soviet bloc country that borders Romania.
Whether it’s Moldova, Vanuatu, or Chad, this burgeoning dialing industry can probably expect to take quite a bit of heat from angry customers and irritated Internet service providers.
Even Adultbuffet had grown weary of the dialing mess by the end of Thursday, and "Brad" said it was likely to ditch the whole thing. "No advertising is worth this kind of problem," he said.
And for at least some customers, neither is the smut.
Tore Loding, for one, says he’s going to try and break his habit altogether. "I’m very careful now, I got scared away from it," he said. "It was like a slap on my wrist. I was naughty."
