Sms.ac spam scam
7 12 2004Ok, I’ve been suckered (only because I took the link from my wee brother, cheers Barry!), but, apparently the sms.ac mails that have been flying around lately are all part of a money-making scam. More details in the below email which I received:
Remember that SMS.ac spam you may or may not have received last week?
Its a total scam, have a read of this: (from www.unleadedonline.net)
—————-
SMS.AC – An Internet Scam to the Extreme (Funnily enough if you
rearrange the letters and you get ‘SCAMS’)There’s a new spam n’ scam going around, unfortunately unlike most
spams that you receive, it really isn’t that obvious - At least not to
some people.Before I get into the nitty gritty, I’m going to have a quick bitch
about the fact that I find it unbelievable and slightly depressing,
the number of people that still manage to trust ‘internet businesses’
which come out with ‘freebies’, and even funnier, some who still hold
onto the belief that you can get something for nothing these days -
and everybody can be a winner.No, I’m sorry to break it too you, but the zero sum formula of
economic gain exists for a reason. Somebody has to pay, and it’s
usually you.Now while spam assassin quite happily nukes the hundreds of penis
enlargement, Viagra, Ch3aP s0ftware and WORK AT HOME emails I receive
a week - It hasn’t managed to block the dozen or more ‘From Somebody:
Invitation and new email address’ SMS.AC spam emails that I have been
receiving.So what’s the deal?
Well quite simply SMS.AC is a scam, if you receive an email inviting
you to join them, and you do (which requires your mobile number), it’s
over. What you should of done is just deleted the email, and sent the
poor sucker who joined up and spammed your inbox, a link to here.Put simply, this fraudulent ‘internet media company’ will deduct $3.00
from your mobile phone account for every 3 messages you receive
through them. They will then send you an sms every day containing
advertising so that you are automatically billed for $3.00 every 3
days*! The charges will come under “SMS Content” (Technically not an
advertisement, but a ‘Premium SMS’).Oh and by the way, while sending the odd SMS through this scam might
be free - The receiver pays 50 cents*.So what can you do?
Apart from growing older and if possible, slightly wiser - A first
point of call would probably be a call to your mobile provider. The
second is usually the ACCC, but the reality is they can’t do anything,
as the company is outside their jurisdiction (Read: Not Australian).
Lastly you could try your luck sending the ‘CANCEL’ SMS Command to
them - this costs money though.So in summary, the criminals who started this are making more money
than you could possibly imagine - the market of naive people is a big
one, so you have to admire them in that respect. Well not really, but
I digress.
Thanks.. I received an email just like this. Searched it on google.com and your link showed up talking about it. I knew it was spam, but wanted to look further what it is since it didn’t get ‘blocked’. this info really helps and will let others know ahead of time.
Luckily you were quick enough to catch this before being suckered into it! I’m usually more than cautious when it comes to stuff like this, I suppose it’s the fact that I got it from my wee bro, who normally is more clued in than to go for something like this as well is what made me sign up (that and the fact that I think there might have been a few whisky’s on board when i signed up!). Anyways, it doesn’t affect me as of now, as they don’t seem to be able to operate in Ireland, but, do make sure you can warn as many people as possible!
http://www.sms.ac/smsCredits.asp
Find out here how much they will charge you… I havn’t signed up but it appears that you have to opt out of services at a charge of 50p(UKP). During the registration you are asked how many “flirt” messages you would like to recieve a day - there is no zero value! Invites by going through your hotmail or yahoo accounts are incredibly sneaky (although it does warn you). In their Terms and Conditions it says that they reserve the right to send you one advert a day. They will almost certainly charge you to recieve that advert!
For some people this might work - but if I were you I would stay WELL AWAY!!
Fact: Nothing in life is FREE!
Hmm… ok I have one problem with this. I joined and I’m not losing any money!! And not because I don’t have any money on my phone, cos I have like over $100 prepay credit… but I haven’t lost anything!! So is this like something they slip on you overnight at a random date or am i just randomly lucky? :S
So whats going on here then? Theyre actually being approved and awarded?
http://sms.ac/corporate/post/video_pousti.aspx
Most of what you’re reading about SMS.ac is a scam itself. Congrats on getting suckered by ex-employees with a personal vendette against the company. The guy on the unleaded.com - guess what? disgruntled employee? heard it second hand and decided to jump on the bashing bandwagen? Funny. This is what i’ve posted on the Whirlpool forum concerning SMS.ac.
Hi there,
I’m a web/graphics designer for sms.ac. I’ve come across a few of posts in forums about sms.ac that have ranged from the completely absurd and hilarious, to some very valid comments. I think it’s funny the conclusions some people have made to Michael Pousti’s name, as well as the sms.ac = scams. Clever stuff. Anyways, I am a real person working in San Diego at this company and I wanted to mention a few things.
sms.ac is not a scam - nor has it ever been. Had we been a real scam you would have definitely heard it from everywhere not just the four or five forums that i found searching google. There have been plenty of scams on the internet and I remember hearing about them posted on MSN, on the news, radio, and tons of other resources. If you do some research you will see that CBS, CNBC, IDC, Alexa, Yahoo Finance, Lycos, etc have all done major reports on us and the company. Surely if sms.ac were truely scammers they and their resources at hand would have said something. Here’s some articles they’ve done on us.
Lycos Finance: http://finance.lycos.com/qc/news/story.aspx?symbols=PRIMEZONE:100&story=200411191850_PZN_68067
Yahoo Finance UK: http://uk.biz.yahoo.com/041210/290/f8asr.html
Here you will see articles and verified press releases about SMS.ac http://www.sms.ac/corporate/post/video_pousti.aspx
I was curious about some of these allegations and did some research of my own. I found out that several of the people that have posted this stuff are indeed ex-employees of sms.ac that got pissed off and quit, determined to do whatever they could to disrupt the company. Real mature. Also, sms.ac does indeed have millions of active users and we see a lot of satisified customers everyday.
There has been some mention about “seeding” and how sms.ac is using employees using ghost accounts to spam club messages to premiere accounts. This was indeed done FOUR YEARS ago when the clubs first were offered as to increase interest and site activity. It has not been done since then.
I sit right next to the Customer Service and i hear them taking calls. There are people that choose to opt out of our premiere services. I do not hear the CS people in any way badgering these people. We offer full refunds and will cancel you from our services no hassel guaranteed.
Malaysia was our 2nd biggest market, we lost that market because we were not clear enough in our pricing and opting of our channels and clubs. This has been changed and we have re-entered Malaysia’s market sometime in the last few months. They are now steadily becoming one of our top markets again.
The two major VALID concerns I’ve seen is that:
1. During registration the synching of your Hotmail and Yahoo accounts were done without you knowing it.
- I am personally making sure that this changes. There is now a “manual” button that you can manually de-select people that you do not want to synch. I am further improving this by making sure that if you simply click NEXT on the registration it DOES NOT send out stuff to everyone on your address list. You would HAVE to manually ADD them in order for this to work. I am also personally creating an online flash tutorial that will go step by step to show you how and what this function of the registration does.
2. Billing for sms.ac text messages.
- We do NOT bill you for official ads/notifications. You are billed for premium services only. The problem is thus: we do not have control over your carriers policies. If they say they are going to bill you for every txt message you get or receive we can’t do anything about it. So even though WE don’t charge you, you are still getting charged by the CARRIERS. The amount of e-mail and text message advertising we send out HAS to be regulated. This is something that I personally feel has to be done. I hate SPAM as much as everyone else.
Guys, complaints, feedback, etc, is important. I’m a regular guy like you - I’m not some high and mighty corporate worker sitting in a corner office with a plaque of my name stamped on it. I have a wife and a family to support, i have no illusions of grandeur. I work hard and take pride in what i do. I am not ignorant or have had the “wool pulled over my eyes.” Come on people, the people that have started these threads haven’t really provided any concrete information…they’ve posted second and thirdhand crap that they found on the internet. No verifiable sources, no PROOF, just personal attacks and their say-so. Read those articles, talk to real people that use this service and our site. We have gone through many changes - you can be sure that people complained a lot about this software company that came out with a operating system…you might know it called Microsoft. But they got better, they improved…SMS.ac may not be godlike answer to all your needs but the company is real, legit, employs and pays real people, and truely believes in the goal of becoming the #1 in the Mobilespace.
They suddenly send you just an e-mail and if you don’t opt out, they would start spamming your phone with junk SMS that costs US$0.99 per msg.
If it is not a SCAM, then what is it?
p.s. I had never opted in to the so called “automatic billing program”
Hi xxxxxxxxxxx,
smsChannels, smsClubs and smsMail are coming to your mobile phone soon!
Opted-In Per Message Billing Program
You previously opted-in to an automatic billing program with SMS.ac. Starting October 6th, 2004 each time you receive a premium sms with SMS.ac, a charge of $0.99 will be drawn against your account. To unsubscribe from billing programs, click on myAccount, then follow the instructions. You can also opt out from your phone by sending STOPALL to 8296. Remember, if you opt-out, you will not be eligible to receive free messages. Enjoy your smsChannels, smsClubs and smsMail and thank you for being a part of the largest mobile community in the world… SMS.ac!
Chris McKibbin
VP of Customer Relations
Not a scam right? I keep getting spammed by these guys. There’s apparently no way to even contact them without signing up. That’s real legit. Plus canned emails from them are signed by the person who got you on the list. Great practices. And this guy has the nerve to come on here and say it’s not a scam. Can we say damage control? I’m a web/graphic designer too, and I certainly don’t go around posting messages like that defending my company. I have a message for that guy: I have some speakers here in my white van I’d like to sell you.
Strange, I have been using sms.ac services for a little under a year and have never been billed for anything I didn’t agree to.
The employee thing makes sense if the company was in seed stage and employees agreed to work for stock options, this is not a new practice, but when people agree to things that they later regret there is usually blame cast every way but themselves.
I use this service and never pay for what I dont use. Pay attention to checkboxes on the internet before you whine.
Hi just another disgruntled user.
I signed up when i got an email, doh! Since then I received £20 of unwanted texts marked as premium, just as an example why would I a heterosexual white 19 yo male living in Newcastle being looking for a homosexual black 34 y o male living in London? And also spam saying that I have failed in my bid to buy things that I haven’t bid on?
This site may not see themselves as a scam, but £20 for a load of rubbish? It would have been more if my little bro who was on pay as you go noticed he was being stung.
Scam
A fraudulent business scheme; a swindle
Swindle
To cheat or defraud of money or property.
To obtain by fraudulent means: swindled money from the company.
I point to the first definition for swindle as I have been cheated out of money.
This is shocking that this company is getting away with this!
heh, Chris
Funny you should post on here yesterday, I also live in newcastle and I was also sucked because I recived this email from a colleague who is usually fairly clued up so I thought, must be some free txt’ing on the go for work get in and signed up. I dunno why, was a moment of madness because I have cbfsms in my fav’s (but then you never know how long these kind of companies will live for doing free txt). Anyway, I digress I signed up for it and got stung for about £3.50 for unwanted messages and txting them back to get removed, I had to txt back to 4 messages before they stopped. My mate on the other hand has just recived an extra £120 on his phone bill because of this.
For all sms.ac say they are not a scam, Dont trust it, the “service” will cost you money one way or another, so unless your happy to splash teh cash just stay away.
Just got suckered into this - I got the invitation email from somebody who I thought would have known better so I signed up and only got suspicious when it asked me for my hotmail password… I stopped straight away but I’d already entered my mobile number and I’ve just received an “activation code” sms…
Needless to say I don’t want to receive any premium sms messages and I am not looking forward to trying to explain this to my company if they start getting billed (small mercy that it is not my own telephone).
Finally, in case anybody reading has any doubts, the “delete account” page is permanently not accessible, so this is definately a scam.
Since a friend thought her nephew sent her a message, I have been getting bogus messages that say they come from her. They come from these scammers. By the way, they have no WHOIS entry at all. Why would an honest company in San Diego CA use .ac as a Top Level Domain? These folks INTENDED to scam!
Yep… I also looked for them with WHOIS, to no avail. But, I was pointed to this site for more info on the .AC domain…
Interesting, eh?
sms.ac is a scam. They even try and scam you into thinking you’re being scammed into thinking its a scam. Well, I’ll explain some facts, and it’ll be obvious. Tonight, a non-tech-savvy friend of mine was tricked into signing up. sms.ac took the password to her email account to go into her addressbook and send out “invitations” to everybody, including myself, claiming to be directly from my friend. This was done completely without her permission. A second friend of mine also received an “invitation” because of this, and she signed up. I then receive a personal “invitation” from friend #2….
Save yourself and your friends the stress and STAY AWAY FROM SMS.AC!!
^ You’re absolutely right… I keep getting those emails from people I know only via MSN. And they used the same password to signup for this as they do for MSN.
Coincedence? Yeah right. Add violation of privacy to their list of crimes. And it’s bloody annoying being hassled by their signup emails, though i’ve blocked them now.
today i receive my telephone bill..it said that i need to pay $1548(hkd)!!!! i join the smsac and the result is that!! each day i receive so many messenges!!i dun know they cost money!!i dun want pay the bill!!! how can i do?????
To delete your account, just log-in, go to Site Map, edit account/user preferences, and choose Delete. Under your contact info.
http://www.sms.ac/DeleteAccount.asp
I was stupid enough to sign up for this, no money has been deducted from my account so far so in that respect I don’t think it is incredibly dangerous. However the fact that almost everyone in my inbox received an invite from me without my knowledge or concent is incredibly annoying and quite frankly I was disgusted!
Don’t sign up it’s not worth the hastle…
Sms ac made my other sim card pack up and die. By billing me for extra messages I didn’t want.
To top it off now. It’s saying I can’t send sms to irish (+353) mobile numbers that are under 11 digits long. Looks like they haven’t done their research, cause I’ve never known an irish mobile number to be more than 9 digits!
I was interested by this article because I received one of these messages yesterday from one of my friends (he has a Hotmail account so it will have harvested his address book). However, I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my e-mails, and the message was different. All it said was this:
SmsAc.Mail.InviteBlaster.SmtpMessage
I don’t think this was because I used Thunderbird but was in fact a bug. It probably called a script that inputs the message into the e-mail but for some reason rather than sending the message that the script should have inputed, it sent the call that had been sent to the script (hence the object-like nature of the sentance). Thank you very much for your article on this scam.
SMS.ac is annoying. I’m not an ex-employee, I just don’t like a “free service” like this one and I wanted to defend the customer’s feelings.
If a service is free there cannot be any way to get charged unless it is very specific to being a separate pay service on a different sign-up page.
Anything less clear is a scam. You cannot offer a free service and then blame customers for accidentally getting charged because they missed the small print. This is as ridiculous as making a bad product and blaming the customer for breaking it.
I have complained to my mobile provider and started to warn anyone using SMS.ac.
DjMagra, thanks for passing this info on to me. A friend of mine got suckered into this one and says they accessed her address book without her even giving them her password. I can’t believe all the shills on here claiming that they are not a scam. All you have to do is do a simple web search to find thousands of people complaining about them. Are they all disgruntled ex-employees or is sms.ac a scam? I know which one sounds more likely to me.
Heh, the email in your blog post looks like the one I composed and mailed around to a few people in college months ago when a certain member of my class signed up for sms.ac and had his hotmail address book compromised (i.e. sms.ac used it to spam everyone in it).
Interesting to see how these things make their way around
Speaking of which, I just got two of these sms.ac mails today for the first time in months.
ARGH
I haven’t even been able to log-in — the site won’t let me into the My Account page to end this foolishness. I too feel it’s a scam or scammy — I never said I wanted emails from 17 year old men who want to be my friend.
Fellas,
Rip-Off-Report thinks SMS.AC are good guys because of all the fake rebuttals they get. Instead of posting to various forums, please express your opinions here:
http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/ripoff102047.htm
The public needs to know about this huge scam operation.
Foobar.
I was in the process of signing up but after reading the TOS (terms of service) I decided not to. SMS.ac sent their verification e-mail to which I did not reply. I was later sent an e-mail asking why I didn’t complete my registration by replying to the verification letter.
Anyway I started to recieve sms messages every day from people that i did not know so I just deleted them not knowing that I was being charged 25 cents (US) for every message whether I opened them or not. After checking my cell bill I found that the messages were coming from SMS.ac. I called Cingular wireless and they said that they had no control over this situation and I needed to contact SMS.ac. Upon going to their website I found that you had to sign up to contact their customer service. If I signed up would mean that I accepted their TOS. What a bunch of crap.
I finally stopped the messages by inactivating SMS on my Cingular (actually ATT) account. It ended up costing me $35 total and so far I have not had any success in getting my money back.
After investigating a little I found that the 5 SMS.ac members who had sent me messages for 3 months had somehow disappeared. SMS.ac could not provide me with more info because of “privacy matters” yeah right!
So how could they charge me without my approval?
It’s called “reverse SMS billing” in which the person who recieves the message is billed. This is where the scam is. SMS.ac has employees pose as members and they send out messages daily to other people who signed up to get “free SMS messages”. Every message sent to my phone cost me 25 cents with the money going to SMS.ac.
After searching the internet for info I have found that there are quite a few people who like myself have been ripped off by SMS.ac. SMS.ac is even controlling the search engines as placement can be bought. Searches on google or yahoo are obviously being bought out by SMS.ac as the first 30 or so results have SMS.ac urls.
I also complained to RipoffReports. They replied back that SMS.ac was OK with very few complaints. When I later searched RipoffReports my complaint was nowhere to be found. Even after I contacted RipoffReports about this my case can not be found on their website. Hmm they are both located in the San Diego area….coincidence?