A.B. 'Ich bin ein Fraudster' schrieb:
Telecom billing (dialer, broadband solutions and SMS billing) is used by one out of every two adult surfers in Germany. The ease and efficiency of telecom billing in Germany benefited both end users and dialer companies. Then the criminals came on the scene. They auto-connected surfers who clicked on blind links. Auto connecting when the user was not at the computer was also common. Some dialers made it impossible for the end user to end their session. Some companies stole from webmasters by sending webmaster traffic to numbers on which they did not share revenue. Dialer companies changed ISP settings to charge end users per minute, for what the user thought was his regular connection. Some put a prefix in front of the dialer number to fool the surfer into thinking he was not connecting to a premium rate number. Any one of these tricks could lead to a charge of more than $10,000. Surfers cheated by unethical dialer companies were forced to pay their bills, by the national telecom provider, Deutsche Telecom. The no-chargeback policy and weak laws brought massive income to these fraudsters, but they also brought intense government scrutiny [das hätte Heiko nicht besser schreiben können lol].
Now, the government is striking back. The exciting opportunities for SMS billing throughout Europe do not exist in Germany. SMS billing for adult content is currently banned. Today, telecom billing companies must register every dialer before use. One dialer company thought that they could challenge the formerly toothless telecom billing regulator, RegTP. It thought wrong. In one day RegTP showed its muscle by cutting 400,000 of their dialers. Today there are far fewer dialer companies operating in Germany. Only those companies who operate legally, and are large enough to absorb the new costs of compliance, are surviving.
