Need help for argument with Comcast
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Here's where we are after examining their Comcast portal all morning. I'm going to state facts (in no particular order), so I do not expect to take any heat from the regular bashers here.
I'm also going to say that neither the end customer or I know if Comcast took any actions yesterday after they were confronted. I suspect not, but don't know. Settings I found this morning may or may not have been changed by Comcast since yesterday.
Two hours in their portal, and the printed and mailed phone bill that brought it all to their attention is here on my desk.
- Comcast sold, delivered, installed and configured all the users' phones and each user account. The business manager said they all setup their VM and changed their passwords later that same day.
- International calling for the entire account is turned off.
- Softphone connections have not been enabled for any user.
- Many user are using call forwarding successfully.
- The user who was "hacked" chose not to use call forwarding, but their call forwarding was (until I turned it off) turned on and was being forward to "5" which is not a valid number or a valid extension.
- There are no records of outgoing international calls in any of their call histories or logs at the Comcast portal.
- The calls to Taiwan are listed on the printed phone bill that arrived yesterday.
- 61 Calls to a mobile device in Taiwan and one call to a land line in the Philippines.
- There is a feature in the Comcast portal called "Hoteling". It is turned off.
- There are no Auto Attendant settings that would connect/forward to an outside number
- The calls to Taiwan occurred during a 51 minute time frame. 3:15am to 4:06am
I have lots of thoughts about each of these facts; they all lead me back to a billing issue where some other customer's call got charged to this account OR their was a breach to this account at Comcast and they caught it after 51 minutes and Comcast is not admitting it. The sudden end to the calls and the lack of call logging of these particular call in the portal are key factors to my thinking this way. The call forwarding to "5" could simply be an error that took place when setting up the users for "work from home".
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@scottalanmiller said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
That part is good. But was it changed to something good?
They were told to use a random four digit number
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@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
@scottalanmiller said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
That part is good. But was it changed to something good?
They were told to use a random four digit number
For what? VM I assume.... you would never want your SIP password to be only 4 digits.
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@Dashrender said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
For what? VM I assume.... you would never want your SIP password to be only 4 digits.
Right!
I should have added a 12) to my list. They have NO WAY to see or manage any of their SIP settings. Not IPs, not ports, not usernames, not passwords, nada....
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Comcast brings the phones in pre-programmed with the sip passwords. I don’t believe you ever have access to change the sip password nor do they share these with you. The user accounts they allow you to setup for the users are different than the sip accounts. It’s more like User Control Panel on freepbx. You can make calls from the Comcast apps that are available. My guess is this is what was used to place the calls.
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@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
There are no records of outgoing international calls in any of their call histories or logs at the Comcast portal.
The calls to Taiwan are listed on the printed phone bill that arrived yesterday.I've caught phone companies making fake bills before. It's a real thing that happens. We had a customer get hit with a $10K phone bill that we were able to show had not been made from the customer's systems.
The phone company had been hacked and was just looking for a sucker customer that wouldn't question it and would pay the cost for them. But we caught them and they went away.
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@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
@Dashrender said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
For what? VM I assume.... you would never want your SIP password to be only 4 digits.
Right!
I should have added a 12) to my list. They have NO WAY to see or manage any of their SIP settings. Not IPs, not ports, not usernames, not passwords, nada....
In that case, you are definitely protected.
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@Dashrender said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
@scottalanmiller said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
That part is good. But was it changed to something good?
They were told to use a random four digit number
For what? VM I assume.... you would never want your SIP password to be only 4 digits.
That sounds like what he was saying.
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@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
Right!
I should have added a 12) to my list. They have NO WAY to see or manage any of their SIP settings. Not IPs, not ports, not usernames, not passwords, nada....@scottalanmiller said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
In that case, you are definitely protected.
Except I found this in the itty bitty print:
3.12 Fraudulent Use of Services. Customer is responsible for all charges attributable to Customer with respect to the Services, even if incurred as the result of fraudulent or unauthorized use of the Services. Comcast may, but is not obligated to, detect or report unauthorized or fraudulent use of Services to Customer. Comcast reserves the right to restrict, suspend or discontinue providing any Service in the event of fraudulent use by Customer. -
@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
Right!
I should have added a 12) to my list. They have NO WAY to see or manage any of their SIP settings. Not IPs, not ports, not usernames, not passwords, nada....@scottalanmiller said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
In that case, you are definitely protected.
Except I found this in the itty bitty print:
3.12 Fraudulent Use of Services. Customer is responsible for all charges attributable to Customer with respect to the Services, even if incurred as the result of fraudulent or unauthorized use of the Services. Comcast may, but is not obligated to, detect or report unauthorized or fraudulent use of Services to Customer. Comcast reserves the right to restrict, suspend or discontinue providing any Service in the event of fraudulent use by Customer."Attributable to Customer"... the charges are not attributable to the customer here. Only Comcast had an issue, not the customer. So this clause doesn't apply.
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It's like... if I buy a Ford and they say "all accidents are the customer's responsibility." Sure.
BUT, that doesn't mean that if they crash someone else's car, that YOU pay for it. It's just YOUR car.
In this case, Comcast was hacked (maybe, or just made the whole thing up) and is just looking for a scapegoat to pay for it, it sounds like. Which is par for the course with Comcast. But they don't have anything on the customer account to attribute it to them. So the contract doesn't make it their problem at all.
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@scottalanmiller Gee...sounds like a familiar carrier whom we've finally ported AWAY from
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@scottalanmiller said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
I've caught phone companies making fake bills before. It's a real thing that happens. We had a customer get hit with a $10K phone bill that we were able to show had not been made from the customer's systems.
The phone company had been hacked and was just looking for a sucker customer that wouldn't question it and would pay the cost for them. But we caught them and they went away.
I can attest to this same thing. We "caught" our carrier trying to bill us for fraudulent calls on a SIP trunk; except the said trunk was locked down to 1 IP address at the firewall level on both their and and ours; AND we did NOT have international calling turned on that trunk. So either they lied about 2 things (firewall on their end an international calling turned on) OR somehow our system was hacked AND able to get around internal calling turned off. We had to fight it for 3-6 months before they finally dropped the charges.
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A little more info from another call between the end customer and Comcast.
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Comcast says they will provide a one time credit for the charge IF the customer does a full reset of their VoIP setup from Comcast, and the end Customer's IT must do it.
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Comcast says the Customer is in violation of the terms of the agreement and Comcast has the right to proceed anyway they see fit including cancelling all services.
I told the customer to ask for detailed procedures and instructions to follow that will satisfy their 'reset" requirement. We'll see, I bet Comcast is unable to provide.
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@JasGot They want customer's IT team to do it so that they will be on the hook next time instead of Comcast. I think I'd get in writing from them that international is turned off from their side, so that if/when it happens again, you can pull out that document and shove it down their throat.
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@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
Comcast says the Customer is in violation of the terms of the agreement and Comcast has the right to proceed anyway they see fit including cancelling all services.
This is exactly why you never, ever do business with your ISP. They are literally threatening to release their phone number so that they lose their business identity.
What they have to do now, their only form of protection, is to get a port request filed ASAP so that the FCC can protect them.
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@krzykat said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
They want customer's IT team to do it so that they will be on the hook next time instead of Comcast.
Of course, that's how it is supposed to work in Comcast world. They screwed up, I think, offering the IT on accident.
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@JasGot said in Need help for argument with Comcast:
Comcast says they will provide a one time credit for the charge IF the customer does a full reset of their VoIP setup from Comcast, and the end Customer's IT must do it.
How do they do this, given that they didn't even offer this previously?
