Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

Monday was a pretty sleepless night, being woken throughout the early hours by a no response phone call can destroy your sense of humour, if not your confidence in technology. It started at 1am, and actually continued for 16 hours, and maybe longer, as only after that time I decided to take drastic action and disable the system.

The culprit was my home VOIP service (not actually the service, but the VOIP number being part of a hack attack). Many ISPs offer a VOIP service nowadays, and there are lots of alternatives as well, and this perhaps should be a word of warning if you use one. My service (Global Village), which I’ve had for a few years now came with my ADSL modem/router, a Zoom x5v. This model has a VOIP adapter built in to it. This means you connect it to your home telephone wiring through a port on the back and it provides both VOIP and PSTN throughout the house, pretty neat and flexible. Outward bound calls are routed through the VOIP, which is cheaper, even if making an ordinary PSTN call, but this can be overridden by pressing the # key first. Calls to other VOIP users using the standard SIP protocol, are all free, wherever they might be in the world. You just need their provider’s prefix and their number. I was so impressed with this opportunity, that I also bought a Zoom x5V for my parents when they adopted broadband. We get free calls to each other and it’s familiar technology as it uses ordinary house phones.

So, at 1am, a silent call comes through with the caller id MEUCISS. This is routed through the VOIP system as we don’t pay for caller id on our BT line. Then at 2am, the phone rings again, then at 20 past, 40min past and so on. At about 4am, I unplug the home phone system from the modem and we get a couple of hours rest.

Monday morning I spend some time Googling MEUCCIS. It appears that Meucci was an Italian who developed a telephone system in 1857, and some believe he is the true inventor of the telephone not Alexander Graham Bell. I could have believed it was him getting his revenge! On further investigation it showed to be a hack or trojan, which has afflicted other VOIP users worldwide, and is trying to damage the reputation of Meucci Solutions, a company that specialises in independently testing systems for fraud and other cases. A big box on their front page takes you to this link and how to report it. Unlike the user above, my modem logs did not show the IP address of the rogue calls so I could not block them. So I turned to Zoom’s technical support (Global Village is owned by Zoom) and found that they only operated 9 to 5 Pacific Standard Time, that’s 8 hours behind me, and logging a question on their system gave a response time of 2 business days! That evening I tried their online technical chat to discuss the problem, but it consistently timed out. Believe it or not they did not have a telephone number, not even a VOIP one, to ring. By this time, I’d disabled VOIP on the modem and had no choice but to wait for a response from the question I had logged.

After 48 hours, no response. So I decided to seek an alernative provider and reconfigure my modem to a new service. This I managed to do quite easily. After 73 hours a response finally turned up in my inbox, “We have been running a data capture on your account for a day or two and have not seen this issue. Are you still getting the incoming calls?” too little, too late … after all I had told them I had disabled my VOIP, so would not be getting these calls. I had also told them that the calls were not registering on my incoming calls log on their server, so must be dialing from another VOIP provider or from a PSTN line, I presume. It was no wonder that they did not show up on their system. But the real issue is the quality of their customer response time, something I’ve left feedback about on their site.

Image - Antonio Meucci - credit: Wikipedia

Tags: VOIP, Meucci, Meucci Solutions hack, customer service