what that is is a web dialer.

We got hit by this a couple of months ago. Found $135 in longdistance charges on our phone bill to Sao Tome, an island off West Africa. (Nauru is the other typical source of this.)

I called Bell Tel and they said it's a really common scam, and they don't seem to mind it too much cause they make lots of money off it. By speaking to a supervisor I got as far as having them reduce it 50%. She said this credit would appear on my next phone bill--two phone bills later, no credit.

The way it works on your PC is this: one of your kids was fooling around and went to a "free online games" site. It had a script on it, probably a Java applet but I don't know, which loads this popup "you are now installing blah blah blah...click yes to continue".

The warning message with it is rather long but says in plain English that it will install something that will make international phone calls from your computer!

If you click on "cancel", the next popup you get from the games site will say "Warning! If you want to play these great games, you have to click on "Yes" on the preceding screen! Want to go back?"

If you let the web dialer install, I don't know what it does right away...but if you leave your computer turned on, and offline but physically connected to the phone line, the web dialer program will start calling up Sao Tome any time you leave it alone for a few minutes. ($2.70/minute)

The reason I know all this is that after I got the phone bill, and complained to Bell, I saw the dialer trying to reinstall itself on my laptop. I took notes, then ran Spybot Search & Destroy--that's the one I recommend, Ad-Aware doesn't work.

Good luck. Your only sure protection, if you have this infection, is don't leave your computer hooked up to your phone line.

Bill