Yep, years ago, we needed to call the NHS (out of hours doctor) and looked it up on Google, first result (sponsored) turned out to be a premium rate pay per minute redirect number. That turned out to be a £90, 30 minute call when we got our bill. I believe this practice is now harder to do or not possible.

Is it so hard to remember the number "111"?

It wasn’t 111 years ago when we needed it.

Were they even using phones 111 years ago?

Fair enough.

I thought those were restricted to specific area codes. I think the phone company should be liable in scams like this. Also, there should be a way to block all pay-per-min calls on your phone. This is one of those areas government needs to regulate.

All premium rate numbers in the UK begin 09.

(0870 is "national rate", which can be more expensive than it ought to be, but not to the level available on 09 numbers.)

Hi,

I work on maps spam. I was wondering if you could dig up a link to the maps business, and include a rough idea of when this occurred.

Thanks!

The UK phone number plan allocates the prefix 09… (or +44 9…) to premium rate numbers[1]. A change to an 09 number should be a red flag for the edit — I'd expect very, very few businesses to use a premium rate number as their main contact number. In fact, it seems many categories of business are banned from using them [2].

Some other European countries have similar prefix-based number allocation systems.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_Unite...

[2] http://www.fairtelecoms.org.uk/service-numbers-084-087-09-an...

I've tried to report this map spam before - details at https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2018/04/hundreds-of-thousands-of-sp...

Happy to be contacted if you'd like more information.

Your blog post appears to be conflating Google Maps with MyMaps. MyMaps lets people create & publish their own maps with random POIs: for example, here's a map of nice wineries around Melbourne.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mtgpe7JU9OtHUUdvG_A6Uq0eTp...

However, these do not show up in the "main" Google Maps, and adding spam to them isn't any more effective than adding spam to a random website.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Google Maps.

I mean, the url for these spam entries starts "Google.com/maps" so I think it is pretty reasonable to call this Google Maps spam.

I don't remember how I found those specific ones, but using Google Maps for Android finds some pretty similar entries. Perhaps you could pass that on to your old team?

Sure, send me a mail and I'll do my best.

That is amazing! IIRC in the U.S. there's a few second "grace period" where there's supposed to be an announcement that says "this call is $2 a minute" where you can hang up immediately and not get charged. I presume that's not how it works where you are!

It unfortunately isn't!

Were you able to dispute this charge?

I told my phone company, they wouldn't refund.

I also reported the number to the communications ombudsman .. haven't heard anything since unfortunately.

I had dealings with a UK Ombudsman before, they said the company had promised not to do it again so the case was closed ... I was a bit surprised that they trusted businesses so much.

I would have switched phone companies that day.

I didn't know they even had pay-per-minute services anymore. Does Twilio allow someone to set one up?

Apparently not: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223182828-Does-...

As long as the phone companies get paid for them, they'll keep letting you dial them.

What would be a legitimate use case for redirect services?

When they were big in the U.S. (976-xxxx days, before they moved to 900-xxx-xxxx), they were mostly astrologers, fortune tellers, and phone sex lines.

The only one I've seen in a very long time was for a psychic reading over the phone.

"I predict... you will lose a modest amount of money...."

Once upon a time redirects were used as pricing mechanism for phone-based "apis". So you could call some weather forecast, or sports analysis, yada yada. I don't know if these still exist, it would not surprise me if redirects are used mainly for fraud nowadays (they are huge in voip call centres breaches).

Believe Shazam also started as such a dial in service.

Indeed - I bought some early Bluetooth headphones that have a 'shazam' button, and pressing it would Dail their 4 it 5 digit UK number at the time. I think it was something like 2580 (the numbers straight down the centre of the dial pad.) Calls were capped at 50p I think and you got an sms response with the song title and artist fairly swiftly.

Strange how fast things change hey! Old news article about shazam and aqa https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/shazam-aqa-the-answer-is-on-you...

This company described the service as 'revenue sharing' .. http://www.callagenix.com/numbers/090x-premium-rate-numbers

If you own a business, you give your redirect, expensive number to clients you don't care much about so they don't call bitching about stuff (quality of whatever you sell, etc) and then you give your direct, free number to clients you don't want to lose.