hoax(rumour)

Story:
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Please take care If Some One Asks You To Dial #09 or #90. Please Do Not Dial This When Asked. Please circulate Urgently.
If you receive a phone call on your Mobile from any person saying that they are checking your mobile line, and you have to press #90 or #09 or any other number. End this call immediately without pressing any numbers. Team there is a fraud company using a device that once you press #90 or #09 they can access your SIM card and make calls at your expense. Forward this message to as many friends as u can, to stop it.
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Hoax or Fact:
Mixture of hoax(rumour) and facts.

Analysis:
This message started spreading from almost a decade back, through emails and has appeared again on many social networking sites in various forms. The story claims that fraud people or organizations call people on their mobile phones deceiving them to dial and press #90 or #09 or any other number, which gives them the access to your mobile account that can be exploited in unfair means.

It is a fact that such a scam is possible, but it does not effect any mobile or residential phone users, it is possible only with certain types of vulnerable business phone systems that use PBX(private branch exchange) or PBAX(private automatic branch exchange) configurations. Such type of configurations are mostly used by businesses, hospitals, government and private organizations. In such configurations, pressing 9 is a standard signal to connect to an outside line through call forwarding, so when you dial #09 or #90, the scammer gains access to your line and can exploit your phone line in any unfair means.

Such business phone systems are advised to disallow call transfers to these numbers and must be trained to handle such scammers. Mentioned in the reference section are definite guidelines from FCC to avoid such scams.
Therefore, mobile phone users are NOT vulnerable to any such scams, but yes, one should always avoid call activity from strangers, as a safety measure.

Posted in: NeWS