text spam from 57788

Sysmod

I got the spam "let's chat or pay me 2 euro to stop" today.
Does any one know who is behind 57788? Google didn't help me.

MiCr0

from regtel.ie

SMS Short Code Allocations - Results for Code "57788"

Short Code Service Provider Telephone Address
57788 Mx Telecom 0818 200 074 cs@mxtelecom.com

Sysmod

MiCr0 wrote: »

from regtel.ie

Aahh.. thank you for looking that up!

P.

Solair

That SMS actually sounds malicious ! Why should you have to spend €2 to stop a spammer!

It shouldn't cost money to stop spam SMS messages. I find this whole chargable incomming text message thing a complete joke.

You should be able to just bar incomming chargable message. I really can't see what use any of them are to be quite honest.

There really should be some kind of customer authorisation process before you are charged. e.g. if a company wants to start a recurring charge to your phone, it should have to get you to reply to a confirmation message first.

The whole thing's a bit out of control in my opinion.

Sam Vimes

you're right solair. Nowadays companies are trying to get people to pay for more and more things by text but it'll never take off if people can't trust that money won't be taken from their account maliciously


it should be treated like a bank account where you can cancel a direct debit. All the networks will say is "here's the premium rate number of the people that are stealing your money. Call them for1.50 a minute and beg them to stop"

Sysmod

According to the regtel link from MiCr0, texting 'stop' should only cost a standard text rate, not the 2 euro I was concerned about.

Btw 0818 numbers are national rate,see http://www.saynoto1890.com/

I rang the 0818 mxTelecom number, they said they'd cancel and ask the service provider FTEXT to call me to resolve the issue. They did later that day and said they would remove the number from their database. They confirmed it was free for me to receive the text and that not replying would not mean a repeat of such texts. They also supplied the date and time of the original subscribe request, which they are obliged to supply by regtel.

It turns out in April 2007 we sent an entry to an RTE competition and mistyped the text number as 57711, which was one of their services at the time. And this year they just decided to text everyone in their database to promote this different number 57788. That last bit is the dodgy unsolicited-text action, IMO, but as it has not cost me anything apart from the 0818 call to learn all this, I'll leave it.