France Telecom English speaking desk

[Ron Avery]

France Telecom advertise an English speaking help desk, but has anyone actually got an answer from it?  I listened to their inane jingle and a man talking about "broadbond" for over  2 hours, no exaggeration, from 10.30 to 12.45 then the message changed to all our operators are busy please call back later, obviously gone to lunch.

The reason I was calling RT was to find out how I could dispute a satellite call of exactly 20 minutes, at 18.00 hrs  costing €50 on my FT phone, The number was 0088213880490 the destination is listed as EMSAT.

It came while I was connected to the internet via wanadoo, I have the latest Norton internet security, virus etc detectors installed and they were up to date as I had downloaded iodates that very day about 12.00 hrs.  But just after the download I opened an E mail from a Yahoo message board and my Email started sending out loads of messages to yahoo addresses ( Symantec scans all out going messages so I could see the rejected ones), so I did a full system scan and nothing showed up. 

Giving up on the FT anglais line, I popped into my local FT shop next time I was in town and challenged the call.   FT wrote back confirming that it was a satellite call to Italy but as I was on the internet at the time I must have connected to it myself via a website or CD, neither of which is true.

Is this a unique experience or have other members internet access been fraudulently connected to premium rate lines? I know that in the UK BT have deleted hundreds of off shore phones and Ireland have banned calls to certain islands completely due to this problem.  Anyway as FT took such a tough line over this, OK perhaps I should have taken Wanadoo or Symantec to task, I was offered TELE 2 at Le Clerc's and signed up on the spot.

[Baz]

The problem of the Phone rogue dialing scams has being highlighted  today and last week on the BBC news. If you want to know more and how to prevent this, look at the first 2-3 searches.

http://newssearch.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?scope=newsukfs&tab=news&q=phone+scams&go.x=39&go.y=14

Ron, like yourself upto 3 months ago I was relying on  Norton but it really was not as good as it used to be and like many others I moved onto AGV free, Skybot and Ad-Aware which are  recommended in the first BBC news item. With my current protection I feel much happier than when using Norton which I have totally removed. The problem does not effect Broadband providing you have removed your dial-up modem. A final suggestion to be absolutely safe is to remove your phone plug from it socket when not using the internet.

Baz

[Dave]

Hi Ron, sorry to hear of your problems, as well as taking Baz's good advice about switching to AVG i would also suggest that you take a look at www.mozilla.org and maybe download and use their new browser called 'Firefox' it is so much more secure than IE which sometimes allow these 'diallers'to be downloaded and installed on you PC without your knowledge, i use 'AVG' and regularly run 'Adaware' and always found elements of 'low risk spyware on my PC but since installing and using 'Firefox' 'Adaware' finds nothing, the download is free and installed easily on my WinXP OS PC...good luck....

Happy surfing

Dago