VoIP phreakers establish thriving black market

Telephone systems hackers have established a thriving black market in reselling stolen VoIP minutes. Hackers are breaking into gateway servers used to connect a carrier's phone network to the internet and reselling this access to smaller, unscrupulous operators, sometimes via web-based wholesale minutes markets. Wholesale purchasers of the purloined access are often small telco operations who resell access to ordinary punters via printed phone cards.

These telephone phreakers steal 200m minutes a month, worth $26m, estimates New York telecom firm Stealth Communications.

Telecoms fraud is a well known, if under-reported problem, that pre-dates the internet by years. It is a multimillion-dollar business, with estimates of direct damages resulting from fraud varying from $35bn to $40bn a year.