U have a secret admirer!

U have a secret admirer!

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Discussion

richie_few

Original Poster:

642 posts

243 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
........... Who is looking to make contact with you, find out who they are on 0905 £20amin!!!!

I Keep getting this message sent to my mobile and its doing my head in. i seem to get it at least once aday.

Its clearly a scam and it annoys me that they get my number. Im 21 and hardly at the point of needing to reply to these msgs. Send it to a desparate middle age single man then they might get a responce.

Has anyone else had this or any other mobile scams recently??

__LEE__

7,520 posts

250 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
richie_few said:
........... Who is looking to make contact with you, find out who they are on 0905 £20amin!!!!

I Keep getting this message sent to my mobile and its doing my head in. i seem to get it at least once aday.

Its clearly a scam and it annoys me that they get my number. Im 21 and hardly at the point of needing to reply to these msgs. Send it to a desparate middle age single man then they might get a responce.

Has anyone else had this or any other mobile scams recently??


I get the same one quite often and it annoys the hell out of me.

On a more amusing note, my gran got one a couple of weeks ago and was kind of chuffed being 87

J_S_G

6,177 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
I was getting persistent "text 0xxx xxxxxx for a free handset upgrade now", along with lots of data call pings to my phone to make sure it was a valid line. All from the same mobile "dealership". After ringing them 3 or 4 times, and ranting at them for many an hour, they STILL hadn't manage to stop the nuisance calls. (This included one very amusing call where the call centre op. said that there wasn't anyone any more senior in the whole company that I could talk to, so I starting getting legal on him)

Given that this didn't fix it, I tracked down their offices and went down there in person (had a day to kill, and it was REALLY starting to bug me). Proceeded to spend 3 hours ranting at every single person in the building (you'd think they'd have security, but noooooo... )

Funnily enough, they've stopped texting me now.

Iceman82

1,311 posts

243 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
richie_few said:
........... Who is looking to make contact with you, find out who they are on 0905 £20amin!!!!

I Keep getting this message sent to my mobile and its doing my head in. i seem to get it at least once aday.

Its clearly a scam and it annoys me that they get my number. Im 21 and hardly at the point of needing to reply to these msgs. Send it to a desparate middle age single man then they might get a responce.

Has anyone else had this or any other mobile scams recently??


What, you mean it's a scam?! I really thought I was in luck there!! Damn it, life can be so cruel!!

WannaNiceCar

118 posts

240 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
Getting another scam, where I recieve a 'Service Message' (As opposed to a text message) which, when viewed, says that I have a 'free' ringtone available and do I want to download it now?

Thought I would just ring Orange to check if this was something that they were sending out (Yeah right, Orange give anything away!).

Not only were they not sending it out (big suprise), but apparently there is a way that I could have been charged, just by receiving the message even though I had not done anything with it, the operator even checked my current bill to ensure that I hadn't already been charged!!!

J_S_G

6,177 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
WannaNiceCar said:
apparently there is a way that I could have been charged, just by receiving the message even though I had not done anything with it, the operator even checked my current bill to ensure that I hadn't already been charged!!!

Yeah... "reverse billed SMS". Done plenty of systems on that in my time. You could easily be stung for £1+ per text. Once worked out the financials of doing a bulk RB-SMS to every single/most valid mobile numbers (079xxx xxxxxx, for instance), billing each for £1.50 or so. Think I worked out I could retire for a few years quite nicely on that, even given the network overheads.

HiRich

3,337 posts

269 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
You can stick your mobile on TPS as well (www.dma.org.uk)
It stopped the admirer ones, but I've just had the service message twice this week

john_p

7,073 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
J_S_G said:

Once worked out the financials of doing a bulk RB-SMS to every single/most valid mobile numbers (079xxx xxxxxx, for instance), billing each for £1.50 or so. Think I worked out I could retire for a few years quite nicely on that, even given the network overheads.


I think the networks would get wind of it and pull the plug on the revenue before you got as far as 078xx


J_S_G

6,177 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
john_p said:

I think the networks would get wind of it and pull the plug on the revenue before you got as far as 078xx

Think you're spot on. (Why do you think I'm sat in suburban Derby, rather than subtropical Antigua right now? )

cotty

40,321 posts

291 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
I dont give my mobile number to any company or enter it on any website say when im getting a quote for car insurance and I dont get any funny texts. if a company asks for it I tell them I dont have a mobile or point blank refuse to give it to them

J_S_G

6,177 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
cotty said:
I dont give my mobile number to any company or enter it on any website say when im getting a quote for car insurance and I dont get any funny texts. if a company asks for it I tell them I dont have a mobile or point blank refuse to give it to them

Unfortunately, lots of them have taken to "war-dialling". If you've never had you phone come up as "data call" for no (apparent) reason, then you're lucky.

Writing a bit of software that dials up every number that could possibly be a valid mobile in turn (as a data call, so you can't really "answer" it) and seeing if it's a valid number is a trivial job. Calculating what network you're on from that is then generally fairly easy (assuming you've not ported your number to another network). Then they can sell that data on to other companies to use, too. We're all dooooooomed....

john_p

7,073 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
Mind you, it always amazes me that they invented the whole SMS billing system and decided it would be a good idea to allow companies to just bill customers at will!

T-Mobile started off on the right track, customers only got billed when they sent the message - so you always knew if you were going to be charged for a service or not.

But they soon fell into line with the others, and now a company can send you billed SMS messages all day long and you'd not know about it until you got your bill, and good luck getting the money back because it's not easy.

Still I make money out of the billed messages, so I don't care (legit messages!)

J_S_G

6,177 posts

257 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
john_p said:
Still I make money out of the billed messages, so I don't care (legit messages!)

Not half as much as the networks, mind! The premium they charge is ludicrous... no wonder T-Mobile fell into line - they revenue they'd have been losing on ringtones/games/etc. must've been staggering. (Think I've actually got some stats somewhere on that - and it was a scary number).

mybrainhurts

90,809 posts

262 months

Monday 20th December 2004
quotequote all
richie_few said:
........... Send it to a despErate middle age single man then they might get a responSe.....



They did.......

They didn't........


cheeky young bugger........cough.....grunt.....fart..........

birdbrain

1,564 posts

246 months

Tuesday 21st December 2004
quotequote all
I got the dogging one a few months ago.

I recently got a etxt from Orange saying I'd been selected for 3p texts for 6 months. Thinking is was a scam, I logged onto Orange's website and it was actually real! So now I have 3p texts. :cheers:

Li'l pugs

1,323 posts

266 months

Tuesday 21st December 2004
quotequote all
Anyone on Vodafone can forward the message to VSpam (87726) and they will stop them for you.

Paul