The UK is now one of the top five global hot spots for communication fraud - including telephone hacking - which is estimated to be running at up to $80 billion worldwide.

According to the latest research from The Communication Fraud Control Association (www.cfca.org) the UK has joined Cuba, the Philippines, Lichtenstein and India where the biggest outbreaks are concentrated, with problems continuing to escalate.

As exclusive UK suppliers of Control Phreak, a fully automatic PBX firewall which stops telephone hackers from making expensive international calls, distributors Nimans and Rocom claim to be at the forefront of attempts to contain outbreaks of telephone hacking in the UK.

Chief Architect, Roger Ansin, who is MD of The Callista Group, teamed-up with Nimans and Rocom last year to launch the latest version of Control Phreak, which took five years to develop. It now comes complete with an integrated Proxy Server which only allows authorised access to PBX programming.

According to Ansin, ‘phreaking' is now masterminded by organised criminals and terrorist groups to raise illicit funds. He cites links to the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks in India where it is thought that a gang, over a three year period, made $55m from unauthorised calls to fund their activities.

Ansin commented: "A phone system is a vital business asset but it's also one of the most vulnerable. Phone hackers can breach security in milliseconds. Control Phreak provides total around-the-clock protection, automatically detecting and killing any illegal activity."

Control Phreak works by making a phone system invisible to hackers. The technology currently works with several leading telephone systems such as Panasonic, Samsung and Siemens - with other solutions available from Nimans for all telephone systems.

Nimans says a free demonstration licence is available for resellers along with two videos to show their customers.