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Et Tu, AT&T Wireless? Spamming Your Own Users
from the when-will-they-learn? dept
Following yesterday's story of a wireless carrier in India that had no problem spamming users with text messages for "humanitarian causes", it turns out that AT&T Wireless is spamming its own customers. Showing just how much they don't understand what they've done they claim this is okay, because it's not prevented by their terms of service. How can we trust the carriers not to allow mobile spam (which clearly has the potential to be even more annoying than email spam) when they don't seem to understand the concept themselves?
Reader Comments
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No Subject Given
Cingular started doing this a few months ago. Very annoying to get the same damn SMS from them everyday for 3-4 days in a row.
Finally stopped when I called then up and told them to knock it off.
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Re: No Subject Given
I received some text messaging spam about 9 months ago on my AT&T Wireless phone. I called customer service and told them to put me on the "do not spam" list, and also turned off text messaging for good measure. Haven't received any spams in 9 months.
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question
do you get charged for those messages?
I was given to understand that receiving SMS messages cost something to the person receiving it.
That would seriously piss me off if I had say a cingular phone and on TOP of that I had to pay Cingular for every SMS message they spam me with.
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No Subject Given
AOL's been doing it for years.
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No, this is hardly spam.
AT&T Wireless states in the terms of service that they might send you promotional text messages from time to time. They also give very easy directions to follow if you don't want them at all. It's easy. Call 611 from your wireless phone and ask to be added to the "Do not text message" list.
By using the service, you agree to the terms and conditions that appear in probably 8 different places.
It's also very rare to get more than 1 promotional text message in a 30 day period.
I was an AT&T Wireless customer care phone monkey for a few years and I can hardly remember *anybody* ever complaining about the promo text messages. The ones that did followed the simple directions and the problem was solved.
AT&T Wireless does not charge for any incoming text messages. If Customer Care or Receivables Management calls you on your phone to discuss an issue, you are not charged airtime for that call, either.
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