Integretel, Faq900.com; 900-444-0224 Ripoff scam via Sprint phone bill 2:00 minutes @$20.00 per minute Internet Nationwide

same thing happened to me. a $40.00 charge from Integretel appeared on my verizon phone bill for a 2 min call that i did not make. Reported dialed at 10:57 pm on 11/22/2004. I have filed a complaint with the FTC. I will be contacting verizon and integretel on monday morning.

Patrick,
Chances are, you are a victim of the bad of the internet.

There are enough victims of this scam that I am starting to get upset with the phone companies. They have to know what is going on and they should be doing something so they are not implicit in the stealing from customers. Instead they are more interested in collecting the money from the victims and pretending ignorance of what is going on.

I would guess you somehow got a dialer mal-ware program downloaded onto your computer. This is a program that someone sneaks onto your computer when you go to their website. This is called drive-by downloading.

Chances are your anti-virus software won't catch it. Even if you reformatted your hard drive... it would only a little while on the internet to get the dialer downloaded onto your computer.

Their software will use your modem to dial out to either a foreign or #900 which will be charged your phone for the call. It isn't surprising that the reports of these programs making phone calls late at night, hoping that no one is around to notice. These companies using this type of software depend on taking advantage of victims.

They are scum of the earth and they need to be shut down. Real bottom feeders because as far as the phone company can tell, the number was called.

I would recommend downloading Ad-Ware from www.lavasoft.com. This is a wonderful program which will go through your computer and find all this crap and remove it. Update the software often and run it at least once a week. It is completely free and very popular.

In the mean time I would suggest seeing about filing a complaint with the FTC at www.ftc.gov.

Good Luck,