http://money.guardian.co.uk/consumernews/story/0,,2056639,00.html<<
Ben Whitney's father just could not work out why his phone bill was so high. He's retired and recovering from a stroke, so he asked his son to take a look at it. The thing puzzling him most was a 20p or 23p call every day, sometimes twice a day, to an 0906 number at 1.17am each morning. The calls had started months ago, and if they carried on were likely to add £100 a year to his bill.
The calls lasted only a few seconds, but the high cost alerted Mr Whitney to the fact that they must be premiumrate lines. Had some rogue dialler or trojan software hijacked his father's phone? He contacted industry regulator Icstis for help - and was astonished to discover that the premium rate calls were being auto-dialled from the family home's ADT burglar alarm as it made a daily registration contact with the ADT monitoring centre.
Mr Whitney and his father were flabbergasted. The alarm had cost more than £1,000 to install, plus monthly service charges . The last thing his father had expected was another £100 or so a year in premium rate phone calls. "I traced the number via the Icstis website to ADT alarms," says Mr Whitney. " I made some enquiries and was told that this type of ADT alarm has to 'check in' every day by calling in to their system. The units come with an expensive revenue-generating number as default but I was told they can be modified to call a cheaper 0870 number by an ADT engineer."
[...]
ADT's website says: "ADT reserve the right to programme the alarm panel to signal using a premium rate telephone number. An alarm signal takes approximately eight seconds to transmit, therefore the cost of a call is typically a few." Unfortunately, the message stops there. It can be assumed that the missing word is "pence".
There is no indication to customers that the number can be changed to an 0870 number, which would cost 7p a day rather than 23p.
Fortunately for Mr Whitney, an ADT technician popped round to his Sussex home soon after Guardian Money intervened, and his alarm will now call the 0870 number every day.
>>