Tuesday, December 09, 2003
My girlfriend’s just received some SMS spam (this one in fact), and came to show it to me not because she was going to call it, but because the “sent” date is approximately five hours in the future.
Of course, a quick google of the contents retrieved the page on Grumbletext I linked to above, which tells of people who even called the number and were charged £11 for the privilege. Honestly, it’s almost as bad as this woman.
Anyway, for all those receiving SMS spam in the UK, here's what the GrumbleText guys recommend:
Our advice: 1) report it to ICSITS on 0800 500212 and 2) delete it - you should only consider attempting to 'unsusbscibe' if you start getting loads of the same text - services tend to send out in batches over a period of a few days so be patient and see if they die off.. Oh, and the last main way that we know they use to get hold of your number is: if you call one of these so called 090-type 'prize' numbers, you will often be asked - in order to be able to 'claim' your 'prize'- to input using the phone keypad a friend's mobile number. If you make one up, as many people must do, well, it may turn out its yours, and that's why you started suddenly getting a stream of junk!
In addition, despite our harsh spam filters at work, I’ve just started getting a couple of spam mails a week arriving in my Inbox which is pretty surprising seeing as it’s not given out to anyone outside the company ever. I suppose it must have just popped up on the brute force “possibly valid email”-ometer.