Tuesday, June 28, 2005

This is one frog that should ‘croak’

A new version for the theme from Beverly Hill’s Cop, Crazy Frog Axel F, became the first ring tone to reach no.1 in the U.K, singles chart (what kind of music do they listen to?). It has been a craze all over U.K..... until now. There are stories emerging about how Jamster is robbing customers. One user, Hannah Bayman, ordered the ring tone after seeing an advertisement on T.V and since then, she has been sent hundreds of messages from Jamster inviting her to download more ring tones. Hannah was charged £3 for every message she received from Jamster!!! Many clueless mobile users get signed up for such services and they get charged for the spam they receive as messages. I had the same problem with sms.ac, I was sent spam everyday and at the end of the month I was charged by Rogers for the spam I received. The customer service at Rogers said it was no point changing my phone number as whoever is sending these ‘premium’ messages would find me anyway as long as I am on the Rogers network. Does that mean that our phone networks are giving out our personal information to any company that would pay something like 1 cent for a phone number? What happened to all the laws out there protecting our personal information? We blame hackers for identity thefts when there are companies we should trust that sell our personal information.
(sms.ac was nice enough to stop when I replied ‘End’ or ‘Unsubscribe to one of the messages)
Have you been robbed by a phone company or a messaging service?

3 Comments:

Blogger Nanette Richards said...

Alaint is a nightmare to deal with. Any time I make a change to my phone service, by adding a new long distance package, changing my premium features etc, I have to wait for my new bill to come out to scrutinize the billing line by line as inevitably there will be an error.

Years ago my parents were billed over $600.00 for calls to Chile. I remember my mom saying to the then MTT (Aliant) rep, "I don't even know where Chile is!" MTT would not back down, saying that the calls originate over the month from their phone line and that they were responsible for the charges. My parents disconnected the phone for almost a year as a response. Six months later there was an expose on how MTT lines were being tapped into and customers were being wrongly billed for outrageous amounts in long distance calling! It was great for them to get the apology letter from MTT!

Whenever you're dealing with big business you are open to being screwed... it's important to eyeball all of your billing reports for accuracy.

June 28, 2005 9:59 AM  
Blogger Nicole said...

Luckily I haven't had something as serious happen to me...

sms.ac did charge me for two texts which were supposed to be "free" which annoyed me, but thankfully that's about the worst that has happened to me.

June 29, 2005 7:10 PM  
Blogger Saur♥Kraut said...

Yikes! I am so glad that I didn't download anything like that into my phone.

June 30, 2005 9:02 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home