Telephone slamming

Telephone slamming is an illegal telecommunications practice, in which a subscriber's telephone service is changed without their consent. Slamming became a more visible issue after the deregulation of the telecommunications industry in the mid-1980s, especially after several brutal price wars between the major telecommunications companies. The term slamming was coined by Mick Ahearn, who was a consumer marketing manager at AT&T in September 1987. The inspiration for the term came from the ease at which a competitor could switch a customer's service away from AT&T by falsely notifying a telephone company that an AT&T customer had elected to switch to their service. This process gave AT&T's competitors a "slam dunk" method for the unauthorized switching of a customer's long distance service. The term slamming became an industry standard term for this practice.

Variations of this concept include "merchant account slamming" or "credit card processing slamming" in which a business's debit and credit card processing terminal is reprogrammed so that charges are processed through a different company, and "domain slamming" where an Internet domain name registrar is changed.

In the United States, local carriers have been responsible for distributing telephone numbers to individuals and businesses since AT&T split up into local and long-distance carriers as a result of demonopolization. Orders to change long distance carriers would be submitted to them, and the local carrier would make the change. In the most common scenario regarding slamming, an employee of a telephone company (usually a telemarketer making outbound calls to prospective clients) would submit an order to change carriers to the local exchange carrier without the approval of the customer.

In the United Kingdom, landline telecommunications services were provided exclusively by BT until 1984 when the industry was demonopolized, and the number of independent operators providing fixed-line domestic telephone services increased. Similar fraudulent sales practices have been alleged by British customers who claim that their landline service has been switched to a new service provider.

Slamming can also occur when someone is invited to take a survey or enter a contest. The contests or surveys are usually general in nature, and the participant is unaware that the "small print" on their entry is an authorization to switch their telephone service to another carrier.

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Wikipedia