Telepacific abuse

So a couple of days ago, someone from Telepacific host:

216.70.141.56

Managed to illegally obtain SIP credentials for a VoIP account I have with one of my (awesome) phone providers. Using those credentials (directly, not by compromising my Asterisk server), they illegally registered as me using a soft phone client and began making international phone calls to exotic destinations. I’m grateful that various processes worked and they were cut-off after only spending $20, which is enough to be annoying, but at least not hundreds or thousands of dollars. So, then comes the aggressive action against the abusing moron.

We traced this IP, and the illegal registration(s), and phone calls. The address is owned by “Telepacific”, who seem to have changed their name or acquired “mpowercom.net” at some point. The whois record for the address in question contains these choice tidbits:

OrgAbuseHandle: MIAA-ARIN
OrgAbuseName:   Mpower IP Abuse Administrator
OrgAbusePhone:  +1-877-642-4375
OrgAbuseEmail:  ip-abuse@mpowercom.net
OrgAbuseRef:    http://whois.arin.net/rest/poc/MIAA-ARIN

That email contact is out of date to begin with, but worse, the phone number listed is itself a SCAM service. When you call that number, you are invited to press * to sign up to some ongoing text message commitment. An abuse number is itself an “abuse number”! This is disgusting, wrong, and highly infuriating. I called ARIN, and a bunch of other organizations to have action taken against Telepacific over this, and I finally got through to Telepacific only to be fobbed off with some kind of email contact. I’m not optimistic that they’ll fix this, hence this handy blog posting.

Jon.

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