DUBAI: A case of suspected phone hacking has left a Dubai company with more than Dh350,000 in usage charges for calls they claim they never made.
Shocked staff at the Tecom-based Sakshi Advertising & PR say telecom servicer provider du disconnected their lines after they failed to pay the two ‘outrageously inflated’ bills totalling Dh355,692.58 for February and March.
“It’s unbelievable because our monthly spend had never gone beyond Dh3,000. Not at least in the last seven years,” says Atul Dhawan, the chief executive officer of the media and advertising company that was handed a Dh207,213.85 bill in February.
The figure included a monthly recurring charge of Dh1,869 and a usage charge of Dh202,797.09 for the 31-day billing period between January 1 and 31. By next month, the total outstanding bill had shot up to Dh358,240.58 which included another Dh149,157.73 in usage charges for the window between February 1 and 29.
Unrecognised numbers
“That’s more than 100 times my company’s average monthly spend and more than what we would pay over a period of ten years. Either something’s gone horribly wrong with du’s billing or someone has been tampering with our lines to make calls. The itemised bills for those two months show calls were made to numbers we don’t recognise and in countries we have no business dealings with. What surprises me even more is that most of these calls were made at hours when our offices remain shut,” says Dhawan who has been running the media agency since founding it in 1996.
XPRESS has copies of the two dubious bills that run up to over 60 pages each with lists of hundreds of international calls made to numbers in countries like Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cook Islands, Cuba, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Monaco, Gambia, Tunisia and the UK.
Calls made to phone numbers randomly picked from the bills elicited no response as they were either switched ff or unreachable.
Dhawan has registered a complaint with Dubai Police and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (RTA) but is yet to hear from them as investigations are currently underway.
Earlier on February 25, his company lodged a complaint with du as well but their phone and internet connections were disconnected on March 13. The services have not been restored.
“We have been asked to clear all dues for services to restart. It’s been over a month that we have been working without internet or phone connections, sometimes having to pay for coffees at a café to use their internet and sometimes seek help from neighbouring offices,” says Rakhi Makhija, who manages the company’s corporate affairs. “In today’s day and age, how do you expect to work without the internet?” she asks.
“Even if one were to assume that we made all the calls and were responsible for any hacking that took place in our EPABX (electronic private automatic branch exchange) not set up by du, why were we not alerted and our services stopped when the charges went significantly beyond Dh10,000 which is the credit limit for our company account?” asks Dhawan. “This is a serious issue. If it can happen to us, then it can happen to anyone.
Not only have we been rendered out of operations indefinitely but we have lost huge business in the meantime which affects as many as 40 employees and their families. Du owes us an explanation. They need to sort this out,” he says.
du response
du, however, has denied any lapses at their end. “We hereby confirm that no breaches have occurred on du’s network. The secure usage of systems and equipment is the sole responsibility of Sakshi Advertising and PR,” a du spokesperson said in an email response to an XPRESS query.
For the record
Half a billion personal records stolen or lost in 2015
The UAE ranks 41st globally as a source of cybercrime threats
The UAE is the 8th most targeted country globally and 1st most targeted country in MEA for spear-phishing
Over half the emails in the UAE in 2015 were spam
Courtesy: Symantec
YOUSPEAK: Have you faced any similar problems? Let us know
