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Marco van Hylckama Vlieg on web technology, design, life and everything

SMS Dating: a new and innovative way to steal your money

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Thursday Jun 22 2006

All your SMS are belong to us! I feel really restless... alone. I just felt like sending you a message to let you know I miss you... x

Imagine receiving the above SMS message. Out of the blue. Just like that. From a number you've never seen before. A person who never contacted you before. You'd probably wonder what the hell it's all about. If you're in a relationship you'll probably want to get rid of it as soon as you can before your SO starts getting the wrong idea. You might even decide to reply to the message in order to find out who this person is and whether the message really was meant to be received by you. Not knowing you're just about to open a door to hell, you send a reply asking what that message was all about. After that, the horror begins...

Yesterday my girlfriend actually received a message similar to the one I used as an example. Fortunately she's clever enough to not send a reply. In fact she got herself added to a block-list by her mobile provider immediately. No harm done, hopefully. A quick survey on the internet however told me a lot of people do fall for this trick. Some people are even a tad less smart and actually subscribe to 'services' such as the one my girlfriend got SMS spammed by. That's when the real proverbial shit hits the fan.

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7222

7222 was the number from which the SMS claimed to be originating. A quick survey on Google told me quite a lot of people seem to be receiving unwanted SMS message from this number. this example was one of the things I found (sorry, it's in Dutch). It's a forum message from someone describing the exact same scenario that happened to my girlfriend. It turns out to be even worse than I thought. I mentioned the fact that responding to the SMS message is a REALLY bad idea but apparently, by some 'magic', it's possible for fraudulent 'services' to get people subscribed without them ever having taken any action. Once subscribed to the service, which is often some sort of cheap dating scam (more on that later) the subscriber will receive a truckload of SMS messages. SMS messages with reverse billing in effect. This means every SMS received will cost the receiver about $1.5. That's right, one and a half dollar. For a message you never asked for. Whether you answer or not doesn't really matter. You'll get SMSed either way.

SMS fake dating

Most services such as the one described in this article are so called 'dating sites' on which you can SMS-chat with some nice person you might be able to date later on. At least, that's what the service operator likes to make you believe. In reality, you're sending messages to bored persons sitting behind PC's who will be 'Susie', 'Becky', 'Vanessa', 'Joanne' or whoever the operator requires them to be. They'll happily reply to your messages, trying to keep you coming back for more. They're advertising on TV with pictures or video's of their pretty litttle faces and their sexy sounding voices. They're trying to make you believe you're messaging with some really nice girl you might one day get to meet for a hot date. Reality will hit you with a baseball bat when you receive your phone bill and your 'girlfriend' is still delaying the date you're desperately trying to plan. These imaginary SMS girlfriends come at a price of about $1.5 per 160-character text message you receive. It's not hard to imagine how much that could cost any poor soul falling for these 'services'. For my Dutch readers: check this video and you'll get a detailed documentary item on how people are getting screwed by SMS dating services.

Now ripping off the poor lonely souls who are desperately looking for a partner is a sad thing. Getting people who aren't even looking for anything lured into a subscription by all kinds of fraudulent techniques is however a couple of steps extra down the slippery slope. I'm still in shock because of what I found on the net after my small investigation. There's a LOT of people out there getting ripped off big time. What a sad, sad way to earn your money. SMS dating... stay away. As far as you possibly can.

Start worrying

This whole thing brings up a lot of questions. For one: How the hell do these people get your mobile phone number? Secondly, how on earth can one get subscribed to a premium SMS service without ever doing anything him/herself? And finally, who is protecting mobile phone users against this SMS mafia? The telecom operators? It sure as hell isn't them. While my girlfriend did get herself on a block list easily, a lot of people will probably have lost quite some money before they get rid of their 'subscription'. It's probably a tough call for telecom operators because they too are earning money out of this, even though they're all filthy scams. On the other hand I expect a telecom operator to protect it's subscribers against sleazy 'services' prying on their money. At the moment I'm writing this it definitely looks like Dutch mobile phone users are on their own. Know how to deal with the spammers and scammers or get ready to pay hundreds of dollars for crap you never asked for.

So here's my question to you, dear reader. Are fake SMS dating services and SMS services that lure people into horribly expensive 'subscriptions' common in your country as well? Or is this another sad example of something that sucks in the Netherlands? I'm interested in your stories!

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Commentary

Join the discussion! Leave a comment through the comment form below!

At 22 June '06 - 13:43 Rose wrote:
This sucks really bad. I never heard of it, and hope I won’t be involved in it. Ofcourse it was just ‘waiting’ for a moment when your SMSbox would be spammed, just like your mailbox, but that it would be this way?!

This is a really nice issue for the (dutch) programm ‘kassa’!! I’m quite sure they will do all the research on this subject, because it’s quite bizar.

For now I just hope everyone is smart enough to recognise a number like 7222 as untrustable.
At 22 June '06 - 16:06 Marco wrote:
7222 SMS services aren’t untrustworthy per se. It’s just another number on which any company can buy/rent a keyword. In fact I’ve looked into that myself when I was still working on iFriends

In that case we would have bought the keyword IFRIENDS. Users would SMS ‘IFRIENDS ON’ to this number to subscribe to our service. That wouldn’t make us SMS criminals

7222 does however pop up a LOT of times when it comes to fraudulent cases when Googling. The number definitely does have a reputation problem.

Anyway, IMHO premium SMS services are for idiots anyway, no matter what it is. You must be really, REALLY stupid to be willing to pay 1 or 2 euro’s for a stupid text message…
At 22 June '06 - 19:44 Jeriko One wrote:
I once got an SMS some time ago similar to the one you described above, so it’s definetely also happening in Germany. I deleted it instantly, so I can’t remember the number or if I could ‘subscribe’ to it by just replying.

But this post sparked my interest, so I wrote emails to T-Mobile, Vodafone, E-Plus and O², which are the major providers in this country. As soon as I get some answers (if so…), I’ll post their statement about this issue.

About this TV ads, well I guess exist everywhere in the western world.
At 22 June '06 - 22:58 Marco wrote:
Interesting! Looking forward to hear what the providers will say. I really think that at least in Holland they are doing very little to protect people against this crap, probably because there’s a lot of money to be earned by premium SMS.

The fact that a proportion of them are spammers and the fact that a lot of the so called dating services are fake services with the sole purpose of ripping off lonely souls doesn’t seem to matter much apparently.

I got an SMS like this only once. It was something saying that ‘someone had a crush on me’, urging me to phone to some paid number. I had no idea about how often the spam was occuring before I tapped into a pool of crap when searching the net for 7222 SMS messages. Dutch viewers who google for this will find a LOT of testimonials from people who got screwed pretty badly.
At 23 June '06 - 01:00 Kiper wrote:
Another horrible marketing scam is when they call your phone and then hang up. You see that someone has called you and call back to the number only to end up in an automated marketing service:

“Hello, we are company x, and we would like to tell you about these very interesting products we can offer you…”

Where is this going to end?
At 13 October '06 - 15:21 Geevan wrote:
My next project is to launch a Mobile Dating service. And I only see good things from it especially our customers.
However, I have no intention of trying to spam or outsmart anyone. It worries me that people would be doing this using a mobile dating service as a cover.
I do believe that operators have very strict anti-spam policies and they normally have real control of who uses their short codes (7222).
So I am surprised that they allow this company to continue.
There is now legislation in many countries that applies rules for electronic messages
At 23 October '06 - 00:10 Seth Ward wrote:
You asked… This whole thing brings up a lot of questions. For one: How the hell do these people get your mobile phone number?

I’ve worked in the mobile content industry for 6 years so I’ve seen people operate these services for many years. They start off in the more advanced markets (UK, Scandinavia) and work their way around the globe as each country introduces well-needed regulation to stop this kind of thing, and the operators gradually become more willing to nip them in the bud once they realise their revenues are actually damaged rather than increased as people become less trusting of mobile services as a result.

The way these services obtain your mobile number is firstly by stealing or purchasing mobile databases and sending the infamous messages. But usually the main method of database generation is built into the service – if your girlfriend had actually responded to the message, she would have been asked to ‘try and guess’ who had ‘sent it’ – you guessed it, by entering their phone number. Of course, the system just logs the numbers entered and sends messages to those people!

There are a lot of very worthwhile text services – for example, financial alerts for traders can be invaluable to some people, notifying them when certain things happen in the financial markets. But those guys generally charge a lot LESS! Obviously because they actually retain their audience in the long term.
At 28 November '06 - 15:50 SMSOperator wrote:
I work for chat companies I am not against this per se because if you know what you are getting just some chatting is one thing , but i left a company because you would make fake dates then cancel them sometimes at the last minute after the guy has spent money on tickets and trinkets, some of these men deserve to be taken cause they are liars and cheaters, then there are those fat nasty sloppy losers who have the nerve to think a hot woman like that would actutally want them, please delusional losers. Then there are the sincere gents and I do have a heart and do feel sorry for the real men who are just trying to find someone, its all a scam so people need to be careful!
At 09 January '07 - 06:02 Kyle Korleski wrote:
Somehow, this seems a lot like what Telus would say via SMS.
At 13 March '07 - 15:18 Helen Keegan wrote:
Yup, it’s a problem. In the early days in the UK, unscrupulous companies just made the numbers up. We worked this out pretty quickly in the office I was working in back in 2000 when within a few minutes, all the phones in our office (which had sequential numbers) suddenly beeped and had received the same spam/scam text message.

As a mobile marketer myself, I found this worrying. So I co-founded Grumbletext – http://www.grumbletext.co.uk where you can name and shame junk text messages you have received. You can also find out how to stop getting the messages and find out whether or not a message was genuine. It’s UK focussed but the issues are the same as you have experienced.
At 18 May '07 - 11:27 Ken wrote:
This way to steal the money is rather old in fact.
At 17 July '07 - 07:03 Isabella wrote:
I’m wondering but there are probably a lot of people hitting the hay. This is very common in germany, too. As there are still enough victims out there, they won’t stop this.
At 22 August '07 - 09:27 Elizabeth wrote:
Wow this is great to know. I got one of these texts this morning and immediately hopped on Google to see what it was about (didn’t respond of course). Thanks!
At 27 August '07 - 23:30 Lilli wrote:
The problem probably exist more for man than for women. A woman has a kind of natural instinct not to react that easy on sms dating offers, I can imagine it is different for man. Please forgive me, I’m not that liberated as I sound here. :o)
At 17 October '07 - 11:19 Meteko wrote:
In my country, sms dating are not so common yet. But if a teco company send us any sms and charge us a fee if we did not subscribe, we are able to complain to our consumer association to bring the matter forward. We have a case here where a telco mass sms subsriber and charges $1 per sms, after some people complain to the association, the telco was slap with a warning and had to refund the subscriber.
At 07 November '07 - 01:25 Leila Sky wrote:
I have one word for you “STOP“thats all you have to do to stop the insanity so why not quit whining and use it?
At 25 September '08 - 08:54 Samantha White wrote:
i sing up to 7222 i send text back say stop but they keep on sendding me texts and eatting up my credit no because for them i have no credit and i worry to if i but more credit on they will take the lot plese help me stop them.
At 21 February '09 - 01:06 arthur hansen wrote:
Hi from New Zealand, i googled sms scams as i was sending sms to a lady at sms contacts site. Every txt cost me $3 dollars and i begin to realise i am being led on,as even when i say no longer interested, she sends a txt to bait me to reply. I realise now she is sitting at home making money by luring men to txt her, hoping for more, but all the time she is being paid a percentage of the takings. I was not looking for sex so i was not too blinded but it still cost $30 before i get suspicious.
At 18 October '09 - 04:38 Chris wrote:
I am an international student in Holland, and sometimes they put these “Contacts” in Spits and Metro newspapers. I kept ignoring those ads until one day I tried one of them (texted to Hellen 6336).

I decided to stop the conversation after 3 sending/receiving sms politely. However “she” keeps luring me for more conversation. She avoids my question about her number. I even gave her my number so “she” can contact me. But she keeps sending sms through the 6336 service. Ignoring the message didn’t do any good. Then I explained my fear to “her” that it’s a scam. I’ve asked her to stop messaging me through 6336 because I know that it would cost me money TOO if I receive message from “her”.

In the end she mentioned that there’s a code to stop getting message from “her”. I asked her what the code is, she answered she doesn’t know and had to ask for it. Then I started to google and I found this http://www.smsmegeil.nl/

THERE! Sent SMS “STOP” (with capitals) to 6336, and the messages stopped. I’m can’t believe that they didn’t mention it earlier, and I had to google that!

TIPS: – If the girl is way too nice (calling you sweety, baby, etc just in very short time), it’s a scam.
At 09 November '09 - 14:22 Midge wrote:
I have just come from a meeting where my friend was fired for running up a phone bill under the company name of $7800!! It was through texting someone he thought was being honest with him, that he met through an sms contact site. He failed to read the fine print. I looked on the net and discovered that the IP for this site is based in Germany and has sites in Australia, New-Zealand, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. Someone is making ALOT of money out of vulnerable people!!
At 26 January '10 - 06:37 anthony wrote:
hello that sms contacts site is based in ireland. i text it after finding it on the internet. what i found suspicious was that the ‘lady’ you thought you were talking to texts every morning round ten past 8!!!! good thing all you have to do is just text stop over here in ireland and it stops no more mgs i lost bout 100 euro through texting
At 11 July '10 - 18:13 Levi wrote:
Have a look at this, it’s from the obscure terms and conditions of smsdating.co.nz:

1. Description of services
SMS Contacts operates an Internet portal which serves as a market place for contact advertisements and as a mobile phone chat system for conversing with people on the basis of Premium SMS. In order to post contact advertisements and to participate in the mobile phone chat the User must log on to the system and set up a user profile with his data through which he can be contacted and under which he wishes to participate in the chats. SMS Contacts has no influence on the content of the user profile; in particular SMS Contacts cannot check whether the details given in the user profile are correct. SMS Contacts uses support staff to animate the chat system and these lead to the chat dialogues for the conversations with the users. The support staffs’ user profiles has no special identification. SMS Contacts sends the User by SMS different telephone contacts or chat suggestions, free of charge. Costs only arise where the User responds to these suggestions by SMS via his mobile phone device. These costs are invoiced for with each SMS. The User can send up to two free SMS’s each day from the online portal’s web interface. Here the User is only subject to the costs of the Internet connection which he uses.

3. Costs of participating in SMS – Chat
Use of SMS – Chat leads to costs to the User; the costs comprise the costs for participating in the chat system and the connection costs related to the use of the mobile phone connection: Costs for an SMS inside the chat system $4.00 per SMS
At 03 October '10 - 06:03 me wrote:
hi, I live in uk, a while ago I’ve received a sort of commercial text on my phone with a web link on it, I’ve got curious and I cliked on this link and I statred to chat with this girl, well, I hope is a girl!
hers texts are coming from a five digit number, it’s 69747, and they cost £1.00 per text received. I’ve been chating for some time now but she still doesnt want to swap phone numbers or even meet in person.
I’ve tried to search this numebr on google but I didnt find much .. I dont really know what to think, is it a genuine dating service and this girl is genuine too, or is it just another fake? did anyone know the number 69747 or have had similar experience?
thanks very much!

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