Having received my Orange mobile phone bill this morning, I noticed I had been charged for three ‘multimedia messages’ apparently received on 25th January, costing £3.84. The messages were sent from a short text number, more likely why I was charged rather than them being true multimedia messages. Now, call me tight if you want but I didn’t request these texts and in fact I don’t even remember receiving them!

Anyway, I got on to Orange and basically asked for the texts to be knocked off my bill. They couldn’t do that, the best they could do was to give me the name and number of the company. The text number was 84048 from a company called Transact Chaos Network with a CS number of 0870 4541000.

I was quite wary of the fact that by contacting Transact I may just be confiming my number is active, but I don’t want to be receiving any more of these messages at £1.28 a time! First off I sent a ‘STOP’ message to the number, no doubt costing me again. Secondly, I phoned the CS number. I got straight through to someone, very surprised, who I explained what had happened to. Apparantly they had been sold a database by a WiFi hotspot internet café in London where the data had errors and had been transposed. He sounded genuine, so I went along with it. He offered a refund by cheque and asked for my details. Again alarm bells ringing, I didn’t want to give them any more info about me! I said as much to him and asked if there was any other way to go about it, but of course there isn’t. I decided to go along with it anyway as I wanted refunding - hopefully I made the right decision. We shall see if the cheque arrives next week as promised, and if I get text and mail spammed.

Unlike other unsolicited communication, this has immediate financial implications. This is mainly due to the fact that mobile networks impose a hefty charge on the use of short message numbers, both when sending to and receiving from. The Orange CS representative informed me that there are no procedures in place within the industry to deal with this sort of thing. The idea of spam that costs makes me feel a little uneasy, as I’m sure it does you! Hopefully this will be an isolated incident involving an honest mistake, but what can be done if not?