BEWARE!

Check your Cell Phone Bill for frivolous charges with this listed as a service. Here’s the full story:

My wife received a text message on her phone. It was written in typical text fashion; broken, abbreviated words; random strings of codes. But one part stood out; at the end, it said “Txt STOP 2 un subscribe” or something like that. Thinking that she was doing the right thing, she replied “STOP”. My guess is that this is a thinly veiled way to scam people. My guess is that had she ignored the text, it would have been fine. But she replied.

The result? On this month’s phone bill, WAY at the bottom, in the “Full Bill” view, you know- the pseudo-paper one that most people may not look at, was the following charge:

There is a web site called whocallsme.com, where you can check phone numbers, and see who it belongs to, and people leave messages about who it was that called them. Clearly, this is a big scam, and probably many different items appear instead of “Besthoroscopesonline”. However, they all seem to come from this phone number, 1-800-331-0500.

Wife asks, “Why don’t the cops get them?” Indeed. Overseas, probably? hard to track down who really runs such an organization.