jeremy.id.au

Well we have just moved from the house that I’ve been living in for the last five and half years (since dad died), which is also the house that I grew up in. Though five and a half years is nothing; Mum had been living there for over thirty-three years!

Needless to say it has been a mammoth effort, with over a week of shuffling backwards and forwards. Emptying of the old house being only completed today. So goodbye to my childhood home and the house that I’ve spent almost twenty years of my life living in.

While now I endure the pain of dialup, as I wait to have broadband reconnected. So far ‘rejected’ by Telstra, though ‘correctable’. Also, many boxes remain unpacked. Though we have moved to an area that is greener and possibly more prestigious, it appears to lack the life that the old area had. Let alone, the selection of take away food and restaurants we had.

It’s always amusing to look at the logs and find what search terms people find your site with, particularly if it’s a blog. Though the one that amuses me the most is this NineMSN one. Despite the fact that I’m no fan of MSN Messenger or even hotmail and the various Microsoft web sites, it still decides that it wants to make me *the* Jeremy from the land of Australia. And yes, some people have actually stumbled across my site through this search as that is after all how I found it by looking at the referral info in the logs.

While most people seem to find my site through Google which terms such as:

• Gosia Piotrowska, the actress from Spellbinder who played Riana, one of the main characters.
• Someone else was trying to find something on the frustration of city life. Unfortunately I don’t have any video clips to offer though I’m sure you wouldn’t have to go far with a DV cam to find some traffic congestion or overcrowded trains in this city.
• Finally we have someone looking for a ticket to mayhem, well our ticket inspectors right here in Melbourne may offer you that.

There are many others and I haven’t really checked to see which bring the greatest number of visitors just that these stood out after a quick look in the logs.

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).