a viral txt message is doing the rounds on the vodafone network in Ireland, the viral message asks recipients to txt 10 friends (on vodafone network) the news that vodafone 2 vodafone txts are free for life. when you have sent the tenth message you are promised €5 extra credit, then the message signs off as being from vodafone.
this message has been seen since Saturday (20/01), and hit an 087 phone here this afternoon, I smelled a rat as to grant the €5 credit vodafone would need to be reading your outbound txts and that would be illegal without court order to gardai.
its in fact a fraud committed by persons unknown and vodafone benefit from revenue made of the gullibility of some of their customers to the offer. vodafone after 3 days have not put a press release here on their website (18:55 22/01/2007). Vodafone cust care are aware and have asked me to forward the txt to 50005 for the data protection commissioner, this i am assured is not to grass up my stupid friends that sent the txt but to gather a general count of how many txts are whizzing around. BEWARE OF VIRAL TXT SPAM – vodafone a little PR on the web would help.
[update] this is happening to o2 as well (see comments) also among a group of 7 tonight 5 had got these txts
[update] 50005 is not data protection. its a vodafone number see digitalrights.ie on txt spam
its also on o2…but i really wouldn’t take these things so seriously. If your stupid enough to pass them on, you deserve to waste your credit. I wouldnt expect vodafone to react to this, its not their job to protect stupid people.
Thanks for the heads up on that, Brian.
I received one of those on 21/01/2007 but was rather suspicious of it so I didn’t forward it to anybody else.
I have now forwarded same to 50005.