jeremy.id.au

Had the strangest phone call today:

Me: “Hello?”
Them: “Hi, is that Jeremy?”
Me: “Yeah”
Them: “It’s Aunty Di”
Me: “Who?”
Them: “It’s Aunty Di, I’m after trying to find your Mum’s phone number”
Me: “Sorry, I’m not quite sure who that is, I don’t have an Aunty called Di”
Them: “Oh, this is Jeremy right?”
Me: “Yes”
Them: “Jeremy H?” (started with H)
Me: “No”
Them: “Sorry, I must have the wrong phone number then.”

Now to work out who this Di is and why they’ve got my name and telephone number!

The antics of ticket inspectors has once again shown up in the media (see The Age which even has video footage), this week. While, if you choose to travel without a valid ticket you should expect to get some sort of fine, I’ve long been unimpressed with the way that the State Government and operators handle this aspect of the public transport system.

Well you consider factors such as the relatively small offence involved, yet the unproportionally high fine to be occured (much higher than parking fines), it’s no wonder that these matters escalate out of hand. Before too long we have a passenger being pinned down to the ground for not paying a $1.80 fare.

Not to mention that we didn’t have any of these problems when we had tram conductors and adequate staffing of the public transport system. Hide and seek ticket inspections will just lead to continually high fare evasion and more of these embarrassing situations for the operators and the State Government.

Although I always travel with a valid ticket, my own encounter with ticket inspectors has also been less than pleasing. You often see them standing in a row like soldiers waiting to attack outside stations such as Melbourne Central, Flinders Street and Box Hill. The other day a ticket inspector decided to study for my concession card with no other purpose than to deliberately hold me up. Not to mention that they remind me of those agents out of the Matrix, waiting for you in their grey suits.

If only they’d bring back the friendly staff.

The weather has been a bit crazy as of late. There has been thunderstorms every day for the past four days, including one that woke me up on Wednesday morning.

Only went to TAFE once this week as I was home Monday with a bit of a cold. Went Tuesday to find that I was pretty much up to date with all the work and was able to finish the module. That meant I didn’t have to go in on Wednesday.

This was just as well as I had a meeting to attend at the townhall on the Box Hill Activity Centre where I was stressing the importance of public transport. The approach of the public transport bureaucrats present was rather negative and the lack of enthusiasm could go along way to explain why little is done to improve Melbourne’s public transport.

I signed up to give SMS.ac a try having received an invitation way back in early 2003. There existed hardly any of the warnings about this site that you can now find plastered all over the web today. I thought it might be handy for sending the occasional free SMS (there did exist some geniune free SMS sites in the past), though I never tried using it, which is just as well as I’ve since heard that they charge these messages as a premium SMS to your friends phone account.

In the mean time i received a fair few spam messages to an email address I didn’t even sign up to their site with, alleging to be from friends. Eventually I did go back and check the site out and all, again I didn’t find much use for it and found it annoying as hell because they had some flash player thingamajigs that keep blaring mobile phone ring tones.

At some stage earlier this year, however, I started getting annoying SMS messages from SMS.ac. I didn’t think much of it, except they were annoying so I went back to the site once again trying to figure out how to stop it. All to no avail. Little did I know I was being charged for the messages which were being sent as “premium content”. Having gone back to the site again, the only way you could find any instructions on how to disable these messages is if you go to billing (which I didn’t since I never gave them any credit card details) or closing your account (which I did go to eventually due to sheer frustration). I certainly had never requested such ‘premium’ messages through their site or my phone.

Though the question is, how can charges be made to a phone when such services were never requested, especially through the mobile phone itself. This is clearly a scam. Even Telstra’s own Customer Terms clearly state that such charged content can only be accessed “from your mobile
phone”.

Telstra’s customer service people of course proved to be unhelpful and claimed that Telstra is powerless and has no responsibility over such ‘premium’ SMS billing. They told me I had to contact 5th Finger for any refunds, who in turn were referring me back to SMS.ac in the US. That is until I mentioned the magic TIO word back to Telstra and proceeded to lodge a complaint with the ombudsman. They eventually refunded $14 or so (at $0.55 per a message), however, while I was pleased that they refunded something I’m not even entirely sure if this amount is accurate. I have some indication that it may have been more than this. Though the fact that it’s a pre-paid account certainly doesn’t help.

In addition it appears that Vodafone NZ were doing some investigations over SMS.ac.

So stay away from SMS.ac at all costs. Though if you’ve been stung already, don’t take your phone company for face value that they can’t do anything because they can. If you’re in Australia there’s TIO, you could also report it to ACCC as a scam (in which case be sure to mention that 5th Finger, as the local company, facilitating it) or if you’re fed up with spam from SMS.ac then you could report it to the Australian Communications and Media Authority (again if you mention their local links, that is 5th Finger, this could help).