Comments on: Sms.ac spam scam

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:59:57 +0000

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?

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 23:52:58 +0000

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.

By: Foobar

Foobar — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 11:48:53 +0000

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.

By: AAW

AAW — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 02:34:23 +0000

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.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 23:45:22 +0000

Speaking of which, I just got two of these sms.ac mails today for the first time in months.

ARGH

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 22 Apr 2005 16:54:13 +0000

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

By: Jim L.

Jim L. — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 11:13:02 +0000

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.

By: Tomas

Tomas — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 21:15:56 +0000

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.

By: Mozilla Thunderbird User

Mozilla Thunderbird User — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:50:35 +0000

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.

By: P�g Mo Th�in

P�g Mo Th�in — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 13:08:47 +0000

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!