My wife is the victim of an 0900 phone scam. It goes something like this. You click on a 'competition' that appears in your Facebook feed, purporting to be from Countdown supermarkets with a $500 grocery prize. It directs you to phone 0900 55667 to get an access code for the competition. Having got the code, they then keep you on the line for a long time to use the phone to answer a long series of trivia questions that appear on the computer screen. All along you keep getting encouragement telling you how well you are doing compared to others who are taking part at the same time as you. At the end you get a well done message, we'll contact you if you won a prize etc. Several weeks later the phone bill comes in with a $99 charge for each of two 0900 calls. I hate to think how many people have been hit with this!

This all leads me to many questions about how the 0900 system works. I understand the numbers are handed out by Telecom (Spark). Do they vet the person/organisation buying the number (the top three responses to a Google search on the number pointed towards scam reports)? Do calls terminate in NZ, or can they go straight to international destinations? How are the calls charged, and when does the owner get paid (right away after the call? or some time later?) Is there any way of withholding the payment, or to get the charge reversed? I'm not a Spark customer, so the charge goes from Telecom to Vodafone to my RSP and then to me. It seems awfully messy and I can see that none of the parties along the way is likely to accept any responsibility or ability to do anything about it. But shouldn't Telecom be monitoring 0900 charges as a responsible service provider and flagging something suspicious with such high charges going through?

PS I submitted a report to Netsafe. Should I also inform the police?