Internet Archive

I’m a pretty avid reader of Bob Sullivan, who writes the Red Tape Chronicles blog over at MSNBC, so when I got an unsolicited phone call last week offering me $1,500 if I’d just answer a few online questions, I thought about his online diary of Internet scams, frauds and free lunch offers. I was able to record most of the scam call in a way it could be shared, I shared it with Sullivan, and he shared it with his readers.

On the surface, the recording is just two people lying to each other. I literally made up a CV as I went along, taking the middle and last names of the turn-of-the-century booze-bashing evangelist Billy Sunday as my own. On the other end of the line, a parade of South Asian accents trying to convince me that $1,500 in free money was “not for everybody” but was certainly within my grasp. I suspect it was lost on them that when one of them chose “Jack Daniels,” as a supervisor’s name, it meant that Jack Daniels was still tempting Billy Sunday.

Beneath the surface is the complicated multiple threads of communication that make this scam possible. From the strength of the scammer’s accents, I suspect the boiler-room is in South Asia, the call transported as voice-over-IP and dumped on the US switched network through a portal in Seattle, WA. The victim is urged to upload the sensitive financial data to a website on a Denver-based Internet provider, which the scammers have access to.

To the Internet-challenged, the scammers spin a tale that the website and boiler-room aren’t connected; I bet some of their victims never fully understand the exact method of their victimization, and even if they do, the modern ability to connect nearly everything with nearly everything else on a worldwide scale makes it almost impossible to track down and prosecute the people responsible.

AT&T no longer offers an “unlimited” data plan for mobile users. It’s not a surprise; AT&T hasn’t had the capacity it needed for its early-adopter-heavy mobile uses for several years. You saw it in the fractured and nearly unusable connectivity where geeks gather, like during the South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, or during any of the tech-hip conventions like the NAB in Vegas.

3G coverage falls apart, downloading anything more than a few KB can fail for hours. As AT&T piles more early adopters onto its network adding new Windows 7 Mobile devices later this year, plus the faster multitasking iPhones almost certain to come out this month, it faces a burgeoning crisis.

So I can’t blame them for making the change, but I can chastise them for offering unlimited connectivity in the first place. Since these plans are in fact limited by the ability of the network to handle the traffic, they have never really been unlimited at all.

What is changing is consumers are expecting quality of service. The new devices are much better at eating bandwidth than the old ones, and much more likely to appear to misbehave when the underlying connection is the thing that is failing. We can only hope that if the new charges don’t curtail usage, the new revenue will be plowed back into capacity increases.

From the beginning, we talked a good game but never really planned that everybody would be using the Internet to the extent they are. When it was just the geeks passing the HD video files back and forth we could be bandwidth pigs and the folks reading plain-text email barely noticed the lag we caused. Those days are over, and with it, the AT&T “unlimited” data plan.