mysterious long duration calls on your bill, anyone?

[GreenLantern]

In the past few months, we've started getting reports/complaints from customers about mysterious long duration calls, from 3 to 24 hours.

These show up on customer's Call History, and result in higher than actual usage... and of course, the reseller or customer has to pay for that usage.

I don't remember seeing this before a few months ago. But now we've seen it with several different customers.

It doesn't appear to be specific to a particular device... we've seen it mostly on ATA's, but also on PBX systems.

I just reported some examples to Voipo support, including some calls over 18 hours. This particular customer normally makes about 30 minutes of calls per month, but last month had several thousand minutes of these mysterious calls.

I received an unsigned reply from a Voipo agent that the calls never received a BYE, so they don't see anything wrong. So I thought I'd check with other resellers.

Anyone else experiencing this issue?

[redoneusa]

I would set limits on the accounts in terms of usage. Not that I have resold Voipo for long I am in the industry and International call fraud is can be an issue. Certainly I do not believe the reseller should be held accountable for fraudulent charges.

Would be interested to hear the destination of these calls.

[GreenLantern]

These were just local/domestic calls... not international.

They were made to destinations they normally call.

The customer hung up after 2 or 3 minutes, but the calls remained connected for several hours... in some cases 18 hours.

[chpalmer]

the calls never received a BYE

Does it happen to the same people over and over or is it difficult to track?

[GreenLantern]

It seems to happen to a particular customer once or twice, or in the case of once customer, a half dozen times in a month. Then it seems to just go away.

But then it happens to some other customer.

Hard to track, very transient, no pattern.

We've been a reseller going on 4 years, and have only starting seeing this in the past 2 or 3 months.

We go through a pretty high volume of minutes per month, so we tend to uncover issues that individual customers may never run into.