ISPreview investigate the fraud @ VisualDepth

Conspiracy Theory's

Visual Depth (http://www.visualdepth.com) started life as a very promising ISP, despite a poor web design that made people wonder whether they could backup their claims, they did eventually launch. After some initial signup delays the ISP finally caught its feet and set about producing a good service, this went on for several weeks.

Then on May 21'st 2000 Visual Depth sent out the following message to try and ease the pain of those still not signed onto the service:

"The delays are not entirely our fault and have been caused by some of our associates. Our service routes through British Telecom and Ezesurf, however the Dial Up Access is not held by either of these two services but we are backed by them therefore giving them certain responsibilities. These responsibilities have not been kept therefore causing a delay in the sign up process. However, we can guarantee that once users are signed up on the service they will be given nothing far from Excellent service."

The mention of EzeSurf sparked concern, were they another EzeSurf reseller? Was EzeSurf providing a standard VISP (Virtual ISP) service from its own network? and just what was going on? An ISPreview reader was quick to ask the question and got back to us before we had even sent our own response:

"I also asked VD about their Ezesurf involvement, they apologised for the mistake and stated this was supposed to read EzSurf. EzSurf apparently DO NOT have a web site and are a US based company who have recently set up a small network in the UK therefore looking for an ISP to use and route through."

At the time we thought nothing off it and were more than happy to accept what was said. Although when we tried to find any reference to the company described, none could be found that matched (even closely) the type mentioned (EzSurf). However we still decided against pursuing the matter seeing as it didn't look serious, some people simply aren't listed in all business registers.

Problems emerge

Having left the last issue well behind we didn't think anything more would be seen again. However in our arrogance we forgot about the readers, a collective group that when combined, has a tendency to produce the most interesting insights. Where we ended, the readers/VD subscribers started.

On May 31st, precisely ten days later, we awoke to find several Visual Depth customer E-Mails in our boxes claiming to have details about what VD were really up to. Apparently they had been able to hack the then used dialler software and find out that peoples usernames had EzeSurf tags and that the phone number being dialled was also the same as EzeSurfs:

• Ezesurf 0808 number: 0808 14***99 (Number concealed for legal reasons).
• VD 0808 number: 0808 14***99 (Number concealed for legal reasons).

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