Both people in our household received SMSs today promoting a point of view in the current postal vote survey. Leaving the political aspects aside I just wonder how our mobile numbers were obtained by the senders. Anyone have any ideas, I didn’t think lists of mobile numbers were published like landlines. Do we have a “do not call” protocol for SMS?
Yeah, we got them too. It’s a bit late to try and sway our votes though. We already sent our forms back last week. Been getting recorded message surveys calling us as well asking about the thing. Luckily the iPhone has a block function that lets you stop incoming calls and texts from whatever numbers you put in the list. Been putting it to good use with all the Yes and No campaigners calling and texting out of the blue every day. Interestingly though, I’ve had no emails from either side of the debaters, which you think would be a more popular method seeing as there are no phone or text charges involved. We are on the do not call register but obviously both camps don’t care about that enough to take notice of it.
I see this story this morning saying they used random number generator to send to mobile numbers, sounds like an untruth.
Either way I think this is a worthy cause for Choice to champion the rights of mobile subscribers to not be the target of unsolicited texts, otherwise it will become like the home phone when you have to use an answering machine to screen all the time wasting calls.
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It’s almost certain to be a random number jobbie. My unused, emergencies-only mobe got the message too.
I understand charities, public-interest organisations and political parties are exempt from Do Not Call.
While I don’t like the idea, I don’t believe anything wrong has been done.
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I am currently overseas, phone set to international roaming, and it costs me $0.75 for each unsolicited text I receive on each mobile phone. The costs are mounting up for me for for texts I particularly don’t wish to receive.
It would be nice if the campaigners reimbursed my costs for their spamming.
This is another reason why all organisations, including political, are caprured by the do not call register.
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This is precisely the reason why no person or organisation should be exempt from the do not call register or SPAM legislation.
SMS is not subject to the Do Not Call Register - it comes under the SPAM legislation.
You can report SMS SPAM by forwarding the message to 0429 999 888 as mentioned HERE
Check your Do Not Call Register status HERE as there have also been reports both sides of the current fiasco are blind calling …
You can also email anyone who sends SMS or calls and instruct them not to SMS/call your number(s).
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I get fed up with the amount of junk or spam emails that keep coming everyday i just constantly delete all of them. i know they go to the spam folder but there are so many daily.?
Hi. A hint to help with managing the inbox:
Before deleting each spam, check if your email options / settings allow you to block that sender. This should send spam directly to the rubbish bin rather than via the inbox.
Hopefully you will only need to delete spam from new senders. This saves a fair amount of time.
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My phone lets me block numbers from sending me texts and calling me if I put them in a blacklist. I put all unsolicited unwanted calls and texts straight into my blacklist and never have to worry about them again. The phone simply doesn’t bother ringing and doesn’t collect text messages if anything on the blocklist attempts to make contact.
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Apparently we are all equal as victims phone invasion. After hunting down on the internet the perpetrators of an unsolicited invasion of my SMS account by way of a “no reply” phone number, I sent them an email asking them who gave them my mobile phone number and please delete it. Their email response: “Please be assured that no privacy or anti-spam laws were breached in sending this message. The messages were sent by a method of randomly generating possible mobile numbers. You received a text as your number was generated through this automated process”. No mention of what firm they contracted to randomly target me.My phone isn’t as smart as NubglummerySnr’s, it doesn’t have a blacklist. So, as a penny pinching pensioner but enforced consumer of expensive telecommunications and a devout believer in privacy and being left in peace, I ask our Choice sleuths to bring the offending parties to account and put the case to governments for tightening the privacy and anti-spam laws to protect our phones from the pingings of alien invaders.
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Even if it is random they should have obtained a list from the Do Not Call agency to remove those numbers.
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I had a pretty bad call on my mobile recently from an overseas business gees she was so rude virtually expecting me to buy their product and totally over talking me. How they got my mobile number is beyond me. Just couldnt believe how pushy and overbearing she was on the phone. I actually just hung up in there face as it was a waist of time trying to talk as i couldnt really get a work in. When will they ever sort out unsolicited calls from anywhere but especially from overseas.
in reply to your comments about your message i received a call recently from i m sure an overseas source they were so rude and pushy saying that i had inquired about there product when i hadnt even done anything. She just talked over the top of me and got so aggressive i just hung up after a while got fed up with hearing them. so much for peoples privacy and having rights it totally annoys me.
As a practical matter how would a telco ever know whether an incoming call was solicited, unsolicited, or social? Especially in these times when 28% of us were born overseas and so many have international families.
Why wait for ’ a while’? Just hang up as soon as you realise it is a spammer. When I get spam calls I either have fun with them, just hang up, or put the phone down and hang it up after I know they have done likewise.
So far there is only one (Australian !) company playing that game with us, that is unwilling to cease and desist. I demand they remove the number from their database, but many months later they call again. Reporting them to ACMA re the DNC register can make us feel good, but is a complete waste of time more often than not. Little budget to police and few teeth even if they had all the resources they required. Then they would have to deal with phoenix operations that replicate the whack-a-mole game…
Such is life in 2018 
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Having had so many similar calls I asked my ISP (who hosts my VOIP phone) if they could block all overseas calls. We don’t have any OS relatives or friends or business connections and there is no legit reason for people outside Oz to call us. They said regretfully they couldn’t do it.
A question for the techs, why is this so? Is it that they couldn’t be bothered or is it technically impossible?
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Heh, why of course we just have to hand Telstra our contact lists 
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As a practical matter it would be unworkable because of our ‘real time dynamic’ lives, tongue in cheek or not.
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Because they can use an Australian based number just as easily as an overseas one. Skype is one example of this practice of using a Country based phone number listing if you so choose, there are many others. Some Countries forbid the use of their phone numbers unless you can prove business or personal residence eg Germany. Added to this is an unwillingness by our Fed Govt to block this as they also at times use Overseas Call centres to “telemarket” ohh thats right conduct surveys or robocall 
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It’s true, you can report SMS SPAM to 0429999888, something I have been doing diligently for some time; a text acknowledging my report used to arrive within a few minutes. Recently I’ve started to question how effective this ACMA spam SMS reporting service is. First, I no longer receive the acknowledgement texts I used to receive; second when I examine the ACMA website there seems to be no feedback, no reporting to the public on the effectiveness of the SMS reporting, no stats, no figures, no summaries, nothing to indicate any year to year progress or otherwise. Still it is ACMA, silly to expect much I suppose.
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I think the RNG is more to set what number the spammer appears to be calling/messaging from (caller ID spoofing). My current manager stated that if he gets a call from ‘interstate’ he ignores it on the assumption that it’s spam.
I block every spam number that calls or texts me, but have been getting a little worried about this practice because it is possible that while the number is currently being spoofed by a spammer it may belong to a real person or business and I will never be able to deal with them via mobile.
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC, the same body that overturned Internet neutrality), is surprisingly enough pushing ahead with a plan to prevent caller ID spoofing (link is to press release PDF) by requiring telecommunications carriers to implement interoperable technology to prevent it. I understand that this will be in place by the end of 2019 - now we just need an Australian version.
Call spoofing is actually a much larger issue in the US, with a militarised police force. Swatting can result in police shooting first and asking questions later - because some kid got upset that he lost his online game!
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