Posted by By PAUL OMO-OBADAN on
Consider this scenario: Your wife's best friend just confronted her with a text message purportedly sent by you from your GSM number.
Consider this scenario: Your wife's best friend just confronted her with a text message purportedly sent by you from your GSM number. And that message is just embarrassingly compromising that you find it pretty difficult to convince your wife that you did not send such a text message.
The question your wife will naturally ask is: Who else has access to your phone, because your number conspicuously appeared on the lady's phone as the sender?
What you and your wife may however not know is that you have become a victim of the latest scam exploiting the flexibility of a combination of GSM and Internet Technology.
The above is possible with just N5, 550 paid for subscribing to an on-line portal where any user or company can also subscribe and be able to send bulk SMS to their clients.
To subscribe, all you need do is register online and pay into a designated bank account and you can start sending SMS almost immediately.
Regardless of the GSM network, at a unit cost of N5 down to N2.65 depending on the number of subscribers, the service comes cheaper. In fact, the more the volume of subscribers, the cheaper the service.
And the technology the fraudsters use is even more puzzling, given that those whose innocent facilities are being used to carry out these activities have no inkling of the nefarious activities they are being dragged into.
It has been demonstrated that the scam is carried out with the aid of facilities of companies offering specialized legitimate Internet facilities in bulk SMS messaging.
The process becomes very simple after registering on-line with any of the over 50 of such companies across the country and paying a minimum of N5, 550 for their service.
Shortly after the payment and confirmation of same at the designated banks, the user is then assigned a 'User Id' and a 'Password', which admit him into the portal.
He is then let loose to send whatever text message(s) he wants from any number that catches his fancy - including yours.
Ideally, bulk SMS is the delivery of high volumes of text messages from a server. It is best used by clients who need to deliver messages to large groups of people either on a once-off or continuous basis.
It is also effective where clients need to send instantaneous messages such as sports, community news or local information. It can also be used to deliver contents such as marketing messages.
But in Nigeria, hi-tech scammers have deployed the facility to perpetrate evil.