.
| Mr Reith admitted he wrongly gave his eldest son Paul the pin number
| of the card. He said he had repaid the estimated $950 worth of calls
| made by his son. Official guidelines state that only MPs are allowed
| to use the card, which is issued for parliamentary and electoral use.
|
| It was also revealed that 11,000 calls had subsequently been made on
| the card from 900 locations, including Finland, Britain, the United
| States, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand and China.
|
| Mr Reith said he did not know who had made the disputed calls and that
| he had not used the card since 1994. He said he was not made aware of
| the excessive use of his card - which can be used only with a secret
| pin number - until August last year.
|
| "Obviously this card has fallen into the wrong hands, as it were, and
| there was unauthorised use," he said.
According to a radio report, in order to make phone calls billed to
the card, you only need to know the 8-digit card number and the
4-digit pin number. The Age quoted an IT expert as saying that
"telecards were easy to abuse and security was virtually non-existent."
Fergus Henderson [fjh@cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 09]
0:00
#
G!
