Did a Deja search for "Mobile Phones Warning" and turned up the following. > Just caught this little snippet - > > > > Subject: Mobile.Phone Fraud > > > Sorry Ray, load of spherical objects. Discussed extensively in uk.telecom.mobile and almost getting enough whiskers to become an urban legend in its own lifetime. Seems the latest incarnation came via Oz, though I seem to remember seeing something similar a few years back from the US. These from Deja. Also try http://www.UrbanLegends.com/ and search for <mobile>. --quote-- In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, on 13 Jul 1999 15:55:02 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED]éencroute.fr said... > > > Supposedly, someone will call you on your GSM and ask you to press > 09# or 90# claiming it's to test your telephone. > > If you do this your GSM is supposed to transmit your unique card > number to the other party wich will then be able to use it at your > expence to make a copy of your card. > > It has, I think, all the major symptoms of a UL, it starts by claiming > that it's from an well known governmental office, and ends by telling > you to thansmit this information to as many as you possibly can. > > This has been in the UK for a while, taken seriously by all sorts of people, finally firmly denied by the cellular networks (only finally, some were involved for a while in spreading it). It's a morph of an AT&T story about pabx's being vulnerable to a 90 scam, which had some truth behind it but then changed to residential phones then to cellular. The first thing I can find about it is: A Telstra press release: http://www.telstra.com.au/press/yr98/nov98/98111803.htm Telstra debunks nine zero # myth 18 November, 1998 Telstra today declared that a widespread rumour that an unathorised caller could access a customer's mobile telephone service by asking the owner to dial 9 0 # (hash) was a myth. National General Manager, Mobile Networks, Mr Kevin Phillips said, "Dialling 90# absolutely will NOT allow a third party to access your mobile phone to make calls on your account or otherwise to interfere with your mobile service. "This is the case for any Telstra service, however it is also true for any mobile service on any network in Australia." Mr Phillips said the urban myth appeared to have been propagated world-wide through email and internet sources and is likely to have started from a scam effecting PABX's (fixed network Private Automatic Exchanges) in the USA some years ago. "It has no relevance to Australia or to mobile services," Mr Phillips said. Media enquiries: Anton Jones Public Affairs Manager - NTG&M (07) 3832 5018 0419 313 629 505/98 --end quote-- --next quote-- In article <7ik5ia$32m$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, "Wombat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I work for what (to spare any blushes) I will describe as a medium sized law > enforcement agency somewhere in the UK. Recently a communication was put > out on our General Orders, by the Head of Communications, that all owners of > mobile phones should be wary of calls from people claiming to be working for > their telephone company (I think Vodaphone in particular was mentioned), and > asking them to dial #09. False. False, even for the sequence of buttons that the UL is actually about: 90#, not #09. This story was vectored by the BBC TV programme _Watchdog_ in a spur-of-the-moment broadcast of something a phone-in viewer warned them about. It is completely and utterly false when applied to (a) any company exchange in the UK (b) any mobile phone equipment in the UK. We've never actually been able to identify the model of phone exchange that this /would/ work through, anywhere in the world. At one point, December 1998, someone at Vodaphone was vectoring this story as being true of the Vodaphone system. They became quiet very quickly and I know that, should a Vodaphone user press that sequence during a call all they'd get is DTFM tones. See the thread '90# vectored on BBC TV Watchdog' and various other threads of last year if you're interested in reading more about this. I don't see anything on www.urbanlegends.com or www.snopes.com about it. --end quote-- HTH -- ************************************************************ Ian Jennings Microware Data Services This post is made entirely from recycled ones and noughts ************************************************************ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]