My wife receives weekly MMS messages from Vodafone. She doesn’t recall opting in to the messages. And after scouring and searching the Vodafone website, we can’t figure out how to stop them coming.
Here’s a typical message:
Saturday 23 February=============== Vodafone Rock The Park returns to Auckland for a day of free l ive music! Catch Atlas, Elemeno P, Thirsty Merc and The Feelers live at Three Kings Reserve today. http://go.live/rockthepark Horsemen Family are charging through the charts with FEELS LIKE MAGIC featuring Sweet&Irie. http://go.live/dawnraid Michael Jackson is back in the charts with THRILLER the No. 3 album and the WANNA BE STARTIN' SOMETHIN' 2008 remix with Akon at No. 4. http://go.live/thriller We have 5 Pitbull prize packs, including his new album THE BOATLIFT up for grabs right here. http://go.live/pitbull Check out Vodafone's Music Webstore! www.vmusic.co.nz http://live.vodafone.com/ringtonedownload
What’s interesting, is that if this was an email, it’d be illegal.
But as a mobile message, despite being an order of magnitude more intrusive, it’s perfectly legal to omit any form of unsubscribe link, sender identification, or the like.
Dodgy.
Oh — and if you are going to send spam, it’d be nifty to make the URLs in you message working links. Otherwise it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: mobile, spam, vodafone
The “Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007″ clearly covers SMS. Whilst I was always a little unclear how a 160 character message could include sender details and unsubscribe facilities I can’t find anything to suggest they’re not subject – http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2007/0007/latest/DLM405134.html
Obviously an MMS has plenty of space for such information so its a clear violation. Unless I’m missing some small print? (damn mac font sizes!)
Have you tried simply responding with “stop” to the origin number? That should at least elicit an automated response. Hopefully one with options…
In my days spam came from polite listservs that obeyed your command!
Failing that sick the DIA on them! http://complaints.antispam.govt.nz/SMSComplaint.aspx
Trouble is, it comes from Vodafone with a name not a number (so you cannot send a reply).
They sent me a multimedia clip. There was a line down the bottom of it stating that I if I didnt want to receive any more messages to…
And the rest was off the bottom of the screen. My N95 doesn’t let me scroll multimedia clips. Meh