Guinea Bissau is a Pacific Island?!

Dermot,
I do understand and follow your and your colleagues' advice to hold the fire with announcing the planned crack-down on Eircom (introduction of substantial fines for non-compliance, comparative pricing analysis with efficient US Telcos replacing the reliance on Eircom's figure magic, introduction of a new Universal Service Obligation, which will necessitate heavy infra-structural investment etc. – which are by now hidden in the depth of our consultation documents), until Tony is out of the picture.
But still I went to my bank's fund manager recently, because I wanted to discreetly advise him not to buy into the new Eircom flotation. Boy, was I amazed when he showed me how our millionaire friends in Eircom had already made some unexpected arguments as to why he should buy the new Eircom shares:



Dear Irish Fund manager,


Here's one other reason why to invest in Eircom:
Our ingeniously profitable and "clean" co-operation with porn racketeers.

We have successfully by-passed the Premium numbers (15XX range with prices up to 190c/minute, but bloody efficient consumer protection and damned effective regulation by RegTel).
We have set up a front for this racketeering by introduction of our Band 13, which looks on the surface like the numbers of a few tiny Pacific Islands (we even had the cheek to include the profitable African Guinea Bissau). Pricing is a fat 360 cent per minute. The customer cannot get these numbers barred, as he can with the 15XX numbers, and ComReg are too dumb to notice the scam.

Customers clock up nice bills, because the scammers who run these services smuggle a virus-like "dialler program" into their computer, which dials up these Band 13 numbers, without the knowledge of the poor chaps. See on the above counter how much even a single hour clocks up.
And a dedicated group in Eircom collects these fat bills. We tell them "discreetly" they must have availed of "porn" content and have only themselves to blame. This and the threat to cut off their line makes them cough up the money, we even take it in monthly rates, if they are a bit short in cash at the moment.

While other countries have regulation against this, it will take a long time before ComReg will do anything for the Irish consumer. And if they decide to act, it will take many consultation papers and probably be in the form of a harmless consumer advice leaflet.

Talking of ComReg's leaflets brings me on to remind you about our other nice consumer fleecing scam, our Telephone Inquiry service, where ComReg's ineffectiveness is also on our side. With our 11811 we are practically running a Premium Pay number service, elegantly by-passing the consumer protection of the official 15XX Premium numbers.

Yours

Philip, David, Cathal and Con

P.S.
Don't take any notice of the Sunday Business Post's scare-mongering concerning Eircom's crumbling line infrastructure.
We will not cut back on the promised dividends by investing in the lines.
We've never made a secret of the state of lines, we even told ComReg that they are so bad, it would take 2 billions to get them right. They believed us and granted us the nice line rental hike, now 10 euro more per month per customer than the average European pays.

P.P.S.
How will we broadband enable Ireland as promised, you ask? Very simple: we'll keep lying to the public about what we are doing. We simply adsl enable those exchanges that are already connected to fibre (contrary to what we are telling the public this can be done at a cost of only 10k a pop) and do nothing about the 25 percent of lines on those exchanges that are not capable of carrying adsl. Nobody challenges our false claim to have 1 million customers adsl enabled, when in reality we only have the exchanges enabled. To adsl enable all the customers on those lines would need costly investment, which we simply will not make.

resources:

RegTel's website details how this industry self regulatory body makes sure the consumer is told what price he'll pay if he avails of Premium numbers – that is why Eircom is so keen to bypass this consumer protection with its de facto Premium Number 11811 Inquiry service and its Band 13 (360cent/minute based) service.

Eircom bands and pricing from Eircom's website:



Band 13 countries as defined on Eircom's web site:
"Diego Garcia, Solomon Islands & certain Pacific Islands: Diego Garcia, Cook Islands, Tivalu, Papua New Guinea, Wallis & Futuna, Kiribati, Guinea Bissau, Solomon Islands and Vanuata"
Of course Eircom knows that Guinea Bissau is not a "certain Pacific Island" but situated in West Africa - Eircom included it into the band, because Guinea Bissau is also an important location for these Internet crooks, on the back of which Eircom is doing its obscene profiteering.

Should Eircom claim that calls to these places are "naturally" that high because they are "so far away": Example telephone rates from Germany to these "certain Pacific Islands" prove otherwise; they are in the 40 to 60 cent per minute range. Here are three examples from a German telephone tarif calculator:

How customers are treated by their telco's customer care:

"[reference to item on bill]...these are for Internet connections to adult entertaiment sites. Unfortunately you will have to pay."

"I understand how upsetting this must be for you to happen in your home. It is for Internet connections to porn sites."

"While they are for calls to adult sites in the Solomon Islands we are simply billing them as normal international calls."

"We are not billing for the content you accessed on the Internet. Calls to the Solomon Island are simply that expensive. You'll find the call charges for different bands of countries in the telephone directory or on our website. I am afraid there is no other way out of it for you, but to pay for these calls."

"We have a policy of following non payment through court. What I can offer you is a repayment of this big bill in monthly rates."

How Eircom's Scam Works:
While Premium numbers are more or less adequately regulated in Ireland and most importantly a consumer can have the range of 15XX numbers barred, Eircom uses a neat trick to profiteer from porn pedlars and Internet racketeers by doing the following:
Eircom has set up a special band, band 13, (which contains a small range of tiny Pacific Islands, with names that sound inconspicuous enough) as a front and charge an extraordinary 360 cent per minute. These small islands are home to an array of Internet porn pedlars and profiteers, which use a whole range of sophisticated tricks to plant stealth diallers into user computers, which make the computer, unknown to the user, break off the current internet connection and dial in at the band 13 international call number, thus clocking up huge telephone bills. While the porn pedlar works in co-operation with international Providers like Cable & Wireless and gets a cut from the telephone charge, Eircom keeps its hands clean, by only dealing with the likes of Cable & Wireless – and makes most of the profit from ransacking the poor guys who catch the virus-like dialler. From the 360c per minute Eircom charges, probably only about 30c per minute go to the swindler who operates the dialler scam, probably the same goes to the middleman and the rest, something like 300c per minute is a fat profit for Eircom.

Eircom does not allow its customers to bar the numbers of its porn racketeering band 13. (Customers can only ask for complete international call barring – but then of course they can't call their relatives abroad either). While Eircom may hide behind Internationally agreed telecommunication rules in this respect - other countries do not think that these rules are applicable, when the main purpose of these islands' telecommunications business lies in harbouring crooked Internet businesses, and allow specific call barring.

Eircom is then blackmailing (there is no other word for it) the customer who was caught in such a scam into coughing up obscene sums: They tell him they will cut off his telephone line if he does not pay up and they blame him, or his spouse, or his children for having gone to porn pages on the Internet and to have brought it on to themselves. They even offer monthly rates to accommodate the payment of these obscene bills.

Other European countries have regulated all dialler numbers - for example all dialler service providers have to register with the regulator in Germany and adhere to a code of practise - and telephone bills that are the result of dialler providers that were not registered or had not adhered to the code (which basically makes sure that a consumer is exactly aware of the cost he is adding up - similar to the code with Irish Premium numbers) have not to be paid by the customer. The same ruling concerning diallers is effectively applied with respect to Irish Premium numbers by RegTel.

By the way, those diallers don't work if you have broadband Internet connection. Mac users are not affected, even on dial-up or ISDN connections.



Off topic, but worth a read: The human rights abuse the Islanders of Dieaga Garcia suffered only 4 decades ago.

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