Text scam - beware

[Guest Honest John]

I received the following text this morning (Orange).

From :-80100

[Free Msg] U are subscribed to THE GROOVE for GBP3.00 per week at 02/01/05 until you send STOP to 87050. Helpline [email protected]

I rang Orange Technical support who confirmed

(a) I hadn't been charged for that SMS (or MMS as they suggested)

(:o If I had responded to 87050, this would have actually meant that I had opened the floodgate to receive £3.00 texts every week! And they would have taken my texting 87050 as being my opt IN to the service not an opt OUT as the text suggested.

Obviously most of you guys would be too smart to be caught by this sort of scam, but you might like to warn your nearest and dearest. It is a total disgrace that telephone companies are so damned greedy to take their cut that they allow ring tone bandits, text bandits and the land-line ISP rogue diallers to be allowed to trade.

Edited September 8, 2005 by Honest John

[Guest Chiz]

Thanks for the warning

[Guest Disco Stu]

From their website :

Welcome to the ldcgaming.com website (the "Website"), owned and operated by LDC Network Limited ("LDC Network") whose registered office is at 27 New Bond Street, London W1. In these terms and conditions "we", "us" or "our" refers to LDC Network Ltd and "you" and "your" refers to you, the user of the Service.

DISCLAIMER : MoDaCo (or its moderators) will not take any responsibility for members who may choose of their own free will to visit the above premises, whether or not they be carrying items of American sports equipment.

:o

[Guest Honest John]

Well blow me down with a feather!

No sooner do I do a post about scams and r-i-n-g t-o-n-e-s , than I find that my use of the words "ring tones" produces a MoDaCo automatic sponsored link to Jamster in my posting! More unwanted or asked for intrusion - the very thing I was moaning about.

Linked to it to see what I could find, saw their top tones clicked on one to hear it and got the message Ihr Link ist entweder inkorrekt, oder die Datei wurde vor kurzem entfernt (404).

They don't appear to support SPV phones either!

Great relevant sponsored link guys! I know you have to make a living, but come on............!

[Guest markgamber]

Heh....yup. I all but stopped using this site when the ads and misc crap slowed it to a crawl on a good day and the moderators chopped up stuff so badly that it didn't even make any sense. There are other sites without the problems and barrage of advertising.

[Guest Pondrew]

No ads or sponsored links under Modaco Plus. As for the ads/links for regular members, afraid that's outside my remit.

@markgambler, not sure what you mean by stuff being 'chopped up' by the mods. If theres ever any problems with the site or particular threads (not including the removal of rule contravening material) feel free to pm me (or use the report thread to a moderator button?)

[Guest James]

BLOODY SCAMMERS... just think of all people who will fall for this kind of crap! makes me mad!

[Guest Xenzo1990]

Ye. Its really bad. I think we should all have SPAM Text Message boxes. On my old phone I used to get 10's of spam texts a week :| I changed my number though. :|

[Guest Honest John]

Following my Text message from Groove, I emailed them (from my office but declined to give them my mobile number). To my surprise, I got the following reply.

Dear Customer,

Yesterday our system has automatically sent out announcement messages to our all subscribers in order to inform what they joined and ask if anybody wants to stop the service, then subscribers have an absolute right to cancel the service at any time they want.

The announce message was a free message and we didn’t charge you at all.

The message sent out to you yesterday was;

[Free Msg]U are subscribed to THE GROOVE for GBP 3.00 per week at 02/01/05 until you send STOP to 87050. Helpline [email protected]

As you can find out from the message, you’ve subscribed at 2nd January, but due to the technical problems, our campaigner didn’t deliver information to us at right time.

What they did is after fixing the system they provide your details to us recently, so we decide even though you’ve joined our subscription through the campaign which I’ve attached some samples, but it isn’t active any more due to the new regulation, we inform you the fact and ask your choice.

If you want to see what and how you joined our service, I can provide WEB and DB logs provided from our campaigner.

For our investigation and process, we do need your mobile number to check on our database system. Oh yes? and that's likely, isnt it!!!

We didn’t charge you at all, in fact we did inform you that our system recognizes your our subscribers joining at particular date through our campaign so that we want to let you decide to carry on the service if you want, otherwise you have an absolute right to cancel at any time you want.

I do apologize if anything problem caused, but hope it is all cleared.

Best regards,

Well, that's perfectly clear then and my money is on the above prose making the Booker short list next year. I hasten to add that I did not sign up for any such service on January 2nd or any other time!