Can a virus dial-up a premium rate phoneline?

Sorry if this is a blatantly obvious question but does anyone know if a
virus/trojan/whatever dial-up a premium rate phone number and run up big
phone bills?

A colleague at work has just had his first NTL phone bill and is shocked to
discover there are nearly £30 worth of calls to 09097 premium rate phone
lines. He's contacted NTL customer support to query this only to be told it
is a premium rate line with 'Adult Content'.

Needless to say he is less than hapy about this, and has asked me for
advice.... like I'd know about premium rate phone calls!

So how about it? Can a malicious bit of code get the computer to dial-up
such a line?

TIA!
--
Rez Manzoori
(remove M-Y-K-E-K-S to e-mail)

"Beauregard T. Shagnasty" <a.nony.mous.RemoveThis@example.invalid> wrote in message
news:AV7Bb.193710$ZC4.71758@twister.nyroc.rr.com...
> Quoth the raven named Rez Manzoori:
>
> > Sorry if this is a blatantly obvious question but does anyone know if a
> > virus/trojan/whatever dial-up a premium rate phone number and run up big
> > phone bills? ...
>
> Go get Spybot S&D. It finds many rogue dialers and removes them.
> AdAware is good too for spyware, but I don't think it does dialers.
> Spybot also finds common software keyloggers.

LavaSoft Ad-aware 6 does dialers and you can simply letting remove that
nasty things.
It also has a future of Ad-watch 3 which recognises all pop-ups or scripts
what are trying to do what you don't want to ...