BT intercepts HTTP traffic with someone else's Final Demmand

On Wednesday morning I tried to follow my usual just-woken-but-don't-want-to-get-up-just-yet routine: checking various feeds (mail/twitter..) and websites from my iPhone in bed (I admit it!).

But I got this message when I tried to visit mobile.macrumours.com:

To explain what's happening here, when I tried to visit any website, BT were redirecting me to the above page. This redirection is effectively cutting off "web" access for someone who has failed to pay their bill. 

But I hadn't failed to pay my bill (I was able to login over 3G on my iPhone to confirm this) and more significantly I don't have BT Business Total Broadband (I'm a 100% regular residential customer).

I power-cycled my router and immediately the issue was resolved or should I say the problem went away (and it hasn't returned yet). 

Having had issues with BT Broadband previously (surprise!) I knew I'd get nowhere trying to explain this episode to the customer support people in India. They are very script-focused and (like too many call-centres) make concerted efforts to pigeon-hole problems.  So based on previous experience I just tweeted @BTCare. BTCare are a small UK (Enniskillen) based BT team who monitor forums and other Web2.0 sources for people clearly getting bent out of shape by BT Broadband problems.

On Wednesday evening I had a call from one of the team, a rare occasion when I'm happy to talk to BT on the phone. They reckoned non of the team had seen anything like this before (shame) they'd been in touch with the group who would have put this block in place so they were aware but there wasn't much else to be done.

I'd thought that the power-cycle of the router and the resulting new IP address had allowed me to  side-step the issue, but apparently this would not have been the case according to BTCare; apparently this redirect/block would have been on the line regardless of IP address. This I'm not convinced about; but someone had convinced BTCare that this was the case.

I don't know where I'll get any confidence in BT that this won't happen again. It's not too bad if I'm just interrupted from my breakfast-browsing, but I'd be a little more peeved if it happened when I was working or if I was not at home but using my internet connection remotely say with Slingboxing or similar (in fact this could be quite awkward to diagnose; I wonder if the incoming network connection would be affected too).

Anyone else seen this?


If it happens again, I'll endeavour to test other protocols and incoming connections before I bounce the router, right before tweeting @BTCare...