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links to other SOS Premium Rate pages..
How did they get my number?
This gets people every time. This list is not
exhaustive but I believe includes the main ways an unsolicited text
ends up on your phone:
1) Some
unscrupulous vendors of mobile ringtones, games, and/or logos
are strongly suspected of selling lists of valid mobile numbers -
the threat of detection and penalty is very low. It isn't unknown to
hear of industry insiders suspecting that the big 5 UK mobile
operators have themselves sold such lists, at least in the past. My
personal view is that the rewards would not be considerable enough
to make it worthwhile for the large operators, and besides I don't
have a shred of evidence to support this view. However, when it
comes to smaller companies then the incentive is clearer - I have
already been phoned by a list broker asking if we have lists of
mobile numbers to sell - which, of course, we don't! And, to
underline that last point, my direct telephone number is included in
our privacy policy and on the message submission page
2) The scam promotions themselves
generate new numbers from the very consumers who are
getting fleeced by them - often when you phone one of these scam
premium rate lines, half way through the call, one is very often
required to punch in someone else's mobile number on a 'tell a
friend' basis. Whilst some may have the nouse to put in a fictitious
number, many people will put in a real number, either because they
do not yet suspect that the whole promotion is a sham, and/or
because they are aware that they have already spent a fair bit of
money on the premium rate call, and do not want to risk things going
wrong, being unaware that the service is probably not smart enough
to detect whether the number they put in is valid or not
3) lastly,
in many cases they won't have specifically 'obtained' your number at
all - their computers, which send out the text messages,
will send in their tens and hundreds of thousands to sequentially
generated numbers which are random suffixes to any known mobile
number stem, the first 5 digits. To a UK text user this might seem
uneconomical at UK retail text prices of 8-12p, but many of these
scam promotion texts get sent out of foreign-based messaging centres
for a fraction of the cost, as low as 1-1.5p, and even if they are
sent out of the UK, the typical cost of bulk-sending SMS messages is
in the region of 3-5p. When the messages are sent from abroad, this
also explains why many of them arrive on people's phones in the
middle of the night and why the time it was sent may appear to be
'in the future' - because that's the time it actually is in India
for example.. Next
page.. Lots of normal sane people fall for these scams.. why?
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