How much are my lads paying for calls?

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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 3:47 pm

I have a Flextel 070 number forwarding to a UK pay as you go mobile. I've been doing up to an hour of talk time per day (not sure how long I can keep up this pace ) mostly from Nigeria of course. I've asked Flextel how much these call charges are but they're very vague and can't/won't tell me. Does anyone know roughly how much my lads will be paying?

Baiting Guru Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 3877

some lads claim, they are really expensive, 4-6$/minute or so. some months back, there was a lad who made a terrible mistake. he did not end the call... and the baiter did not end it either. the call lasted one more hour, till laddy found out.

normal calls are very cheap...

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 5:01 pm

Thanks that's good to know, and from now on I'm never going to hang up first Twisted Evil

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 8:50 pm

I used to work for a telco and you would have overseas students running up enormous bills on their cellphones by accepting collect calls from overseas mobiles. Some were being charge nearly $50 NZ ($40 USD) a minute depending which country the calls originated from.

Baiting Guru Joined: 10 Oct 2010 Posts: 3877

could you tell us more? this sounds very interesting Twisted Evil

Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2012 10:47 pm

It was mainly Chinese students. One girl rang up in tears to the call centre after getting her first bill of $25,000 NZD around $18,000 US and that was a fair few years ago so you could probably double it in todays money.

She was accepting collect calls from mobiles in China on her NZ mobile and talking for ages. There were a few technical anomalies around it but we used to get loads of them in the beginning of the year when they all started their courses.

If you could get the lads to accept them, they have to be from mobiles rather than landlines they may start getting enormous bills, their phones shut down and screw up their credit. and have the debt collecters after them. It may not be the same now but it could be worth a shot. It is something to do with the termination rate agreements between the telcos. Generally the termination rate is set at the receiving phone.

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 10:01 am

Finbarr Saunders wrote:

Thanks that's good to know, and from now on I'm never going to hang up first Twisted Evil

Set the phone into mute mode (microphone off) and the scammer might think you hung up.
I used to have a cell phone where this could easily happen by chance as the button was located near where I held it.

You could do this several times to a lad though I doubt that the lad woudn't check the line after the first time.

I just had a quick look at phone rates in Nigeria.
MTN, one of the main providers in N. has a plan for prepaid phones which charges 20 kobo per second for a call to UK or the U.S. That is about 1/10 of a cent per second (http://www.mtnonline.com/products-services/mtn-packages/super-saver-prepaid). So one minute would be sth like 7-8 cents, not dollars.
Calling a Flextel number could be more expensive but it sure wouldn't ruin the guys.

GSO

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 11:00 am

^^^ you have to remember that in Nigera a couple of dollars is a whole load of money, the figures I found give an average annual wage as being $1140 in 2009.

Most lads will be on pay-as-you-go plans and I repeatedly have lads whining at me because they have run out of credit and lads have actually asked me to pay them in phone credits from time to time.

A good trick to get a lad to burn through his phone credits (which means he has less to spend contacting real vics) is to answer the call and then make whistling or crackling noises (scrunching a piece of paper up by the receiver works a treat). Lad will hang up and call again. Some plans are connection + time so each time he calls it costs Smile

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 11:59 am

So they might go with a plan like this one: http://www.mtnonline.com/products-services/mtn-packages/paygo/tariffs-on-mtn-paygo

That triples their costs to about 25 cents/minute or 15$/hour Twisted Evil

I'd say that several hours of phoning around could really hurt at least the purses of the less wealthy guys considerably. Now I understand why you can frequently hear lads begging for money on the phone. Shocked

GSO

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 7:43 pm

If you use something like sipgate, a nice loooong outgoing message containing a recording of a ringing tone makes the lad think you haven't answered yet, but his credit tells a different story.

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 8:02 pm

^^^^
Especially if you can splice in a nice lady saying " the person you are calling is on another call, please hold" or something similar. Get that repeated every 30 seconds and the lads credit is goooooone Evil or Very Mad

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 8:14 pm

Someone at eater used a recording of numbered menu options, "to make an appointment, press 1. To speak to (baiting name) press 2", then into the second menu level, then the third and so on, just like BT. Select the option you think you want, until you eventually hit a deeper menu level and a brick wall, where the option you want is no longer there. You could add in "I'm sorry, we did not recognise your choice. Please try again " as many times as you like. Have plenty of cheesy hold music. Lads love things like that as much as we do.

Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2012 9:26 pm

^
It would be great if someone could devise a 'voice activisation' option menu as well, eg.......'or to speak to Mr Smith, say Bollocks'.

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