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Killing Unwanted Text Messages from Yahoo! Alerts?
Creighti asks: "When I first got my new cellphone I immediately received several automated Text Message 'Alerts' from Yahoo and MSN which recurred on a daily basis. My guess was (is) that the previous owner of my cell phone number signed up for these things. Six months later I'm still getting unwanted text messages from Yahoo! Alerts.
I managed to get rid of the MSN messages by signing up with MSN (gack), registering the phone number as mine, and de-selecting all text messages. I've tried the same trick with Yahoo. I've tried filling out the Yahoo! Help form that appeared to apply (interestingly enough, the Yahoo Help entry I've used several times to request they stop sending the unwanted alert appears to have been removed, but clicking the 'No' button on this page would work). I've even tried emailing abuse@yahoo.com. Anyone else getting text-message spammed by Yahoo! (or any other service)? Any suggestions for what I should do next to try and get Yahoo! to stop sending these unwanted messages?" Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when the cancellation notices comes thru?
Send them a bill. They are using your airtime, with something you didn't ask for. If they don't want to pay the bill, they will find a way to stop it.
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
I suggest that instead of continuing to try to get Yahoo to stop sending the messages you instead contact your telephone company and ask them to block the messages before they get to your phone.
As they are making money off you and Yahoo isn't, you are more likely to get a useful response.
I didn't think of that...I feel sorry for the owners of my last 3 cellphone numbers.
Because these alerts are like a mailing list subscription and the phone number is like an email address. The problem is phone numbers are reused, where email addresses, generally, are not.
Yahoo or MSN do not receive notification when someone cancels their phone account.
Yahoo! Mobile Devices, log in under your Yahoo account and select "Add a New Device", then add your phone number, or e-mail for the cell phone, depending on what your operator supports and then specifically do not choose any alerts.
Just a guess, but probably what is registered is an e-mail address like 3215551212@sprintpcs.com which is how e-mail can find its way to SprintPCS phones. The service you sign up for may have no relation to your cell provider, so cancelling one doesn't cancel the other and then your phone number (and hence e-mail address) can be recycled.
Ok, not about cell phone text, but about getting Yahoo to stop things...
I have an *ancient* Geocities home page, that was set up before Yahoo acquired them. I am "yoderm" on Yahoo and was on Geocities before the acquisition. Unfortunately, the GC home page is not associated with my Yahoo account. I now have no way of logging into the thing, and really want it deleted.
I've sent two messages through their "help" center, but no response. I've tried every support@ and help@ type e-mail I could think of for yahoo.com, geocities.com, and yahoo-inc.com. They all either bounce or get an automated reply that says "go to the help center".
Conclusion: Yahoo goes WAY out of their way to avoid dealing with human "customers".
Go through your local fast food drive-thru, order a coffee and make sure you spill it on yourself as you are reading your messages. I'm pretty sure the warning labels on the coffee do not yet include: Warning! Do not drink while reading text messages.
honest honey, all the porno text ads are from the previous owner of the cell phone.
Sneakemail and other aliasing services can be used to avoid this as well. Instead of sending the mail to 5551234567@sms.phoneprovider.com you can send it to a sneakemail address which will bounce it to your SMS. This way you can kill off the sneakemail address if necessary and stop the spam easily.
Why aren't the text message preferences deleted when the cancellation notices comes thru?
Yahoo essentially knows nothing about the phone number. All it knows is that there is a number (or more abstractly, an email address) through which it should send its junk. They don't know who/what/where otherwise. They know nothing about who currently owns which phone #.
...how easy is it to dick with people you don't like by registering their cell phone number with dozens of text alert sites? If these messages don't include a way to unsubscribe, they probably aren't confirmed opt-in either.
is 'circulation' - the reason those morons are so keen on keeping people on their 'hit' list is so they can go to their paying clients and say, "Look! You're message is reaching 250,000 potential customers". The more 'circulation' or ratings a paper, magazine or program has, the more they can charge for it. Nevermind the fact that 249,997 people have just associated $PRODUCT with annoying marketing tactics.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I have a cellphone with Verizon (and an associated vtext account for messages.) I tried signing up for weather alerts on my cellphone but found out quickly that the messages sent were too long to be useful.
I was able to unsubscribe from the alerts - but even after I unsubscribed from the alerts, I kept receiving advertisements from the service sent to my cellphone.
After a couple of unsucessful attempts to get it stopped I finally poked around on the Vtext site and found out that I was able to block a specified domain from sending to my cellphone.
Blocking the domain of the weather alerts provider killed the spam as well.
See if your provider doesn't let you filter out @yahoo.com messages.
In illa quae ultra sunt
And he's not a dumbass, either. He's found his choices are (1) put up with the messages, (2) change phone numbers, or (3) disable text messaging (carrier phenomenon). 1 and 3 are free, 2 costs money (albeit not much).
Why (4) get Yahoo! to! stop! it! please! isn't an option boils down to "they don't listen". It's one of those scary companies where there's no apparent way to actually *contact* anyone who can do something about this. There's no there, there so to speak.
He has said that the wireless carrier was particularly unhelpful, which doesn't surprise me. I had a problem for a while when I got my first cellular with getting FAX calls. They offered to *sell* me caller ID (an expensive option on a limited range of AMPS equipment), but wouldn't do anything about tracking down who it was.
I'm frankly surprised that there isn't more phone spam (how hard is it to figure out that all of a carrier's cell numbers are in NXX-5xx-xxxx?) or that message services don't build in a failsafe way to stop them, like adding a user-specfic hash code to every message and then have a web page where you can go, enter that hash, and disable that phone number's messaging.
That is complete BS but the same thing happened to me with email.
This is the problem.
1. Sign up for yahoo email.
2. Register an alternate email address of someone you don't like.
3. sign up the alternate address for all kinds of junk.
Their is no way they can cancel it. Yahoo will do what they always do when you email them for help, flush it down the toilet, or threaten YOU for spamming them...
1-408-731-3300
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
What's the problem? The passport account is under your e-mail address, which means it's yours. Go to the Passport main site, follow the links to get the password for that account either mailed to you or reset (Follow the Member Services link, then "I forgot my password", follow the on-screen instructions), then login, go to Member Services, and close the account (the "Close my .NET Passport account" link). Done.
Trust me. You won't be on that list for long. If you are, take a trip to your friendly neighborhood court and file for a small claims case. Then you're talking settlement.
My
Limekiller
I had an old geocities account that didn't get converted to my yahoo account, and after months of unsuccessful attempts to get the darn thing cancelled, I wrote a letter to the Yahoo person in charge of copyright violations, and explained that Yahoo was violating my copyright to the works posted on that old geocities account. Effectively, by limiting my ability to control the distribution of my copyrighted works, they were violating my copyrights. Not that I wanted to sue or anything, I just wanted those pages gone.
Not long after, that account disappeared, and I was happy.
I can't tell if you're trolling, or if you're really this dense.
See, Small Claims COURT is a court of LAW ; judgements made there must be carried out and paid in full, else the guilty will face federal charges.
Yeesh.. Do they let just anybody come here or what?
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
(Using Windows...) Install Outlook 2k or higher to download your Hotmail messages to your local machine. Install CloudMark and say goodbye to 99% of your spam. This will also remove any space limits imposed by Hotmail, as your mail will now be sitting on your own hard drive.
Really? You can send anyone of your chossing a bill and then sue them just 'cause they didn't pay? How do you know you're even sending it to the proper accounts payable department?
Yes you can sue anyone for not paying a bill.
In court they can just argue they're not the right person. That is why we have small claims court, to facilitate small claims cheaply and easily for all 3 parties. (You, them and the gov)
But what is this doing on the front page? This is something you ask a smaller specialized forum, not the slashdot community. I can hardly see how this will generate meaningful or intellectual discussion, and I can definitely not see how this is news for nerds or stuff that matters.
1. Because most geeks own cell phones
2. Because most geeks have an interest in wireless communications
3. Because most geeks have an interest in stopping spam
In addition, I think the discussion thus far has been very interesting. If it bothers you, you can filter it out in the preferences.
Does anyone have Alan Rasky's cell phone number?
I have a couple really good deals on Viagra and Penis Enlargement to pass on.
paintball
youre bob@bob.com, areny you?!? You poor spam buried bastard, ive been using that as a throwaway address for years.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
/me pulls up his super-secret list of contact numbers
Ah, here we go. Give Yahoo a call at 1-408-349-3300. Took me a while to find that number, but it actually works.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
I used to get a lot of important e-mail from the folks at Microsoft telling me about their wonderful products. After making several unsuccessful attempts to get off their mailing list, I finally changed my profile and set my e-mail address to postmaster@microsoft.com. Worked like a charm.
---insert signature line here---
To add to the previous respondents that also said you're wrong, I can give an example of what happens in small claims. My brother went through this and it took him a year to collect his money.
An established nursery business with several locations in a particular city in Oklahoma let one of their unlicensed, illegal immigrant workers drive one of their spare cars. This guy came barreling down the road, over the hill, and realized he was going too fast to avoid hitting the car that had stopped at the light in front of him. He swerved into oncoming traffic and nailed my brother head on as he was waiting in the oncoming turn lane. Police came, arrested illegal immigrant for no license and no insurance. My brothers car needed major work, and he only had liability as he had just paid it off a month before.
Nursery came and bailed the guy out of jail. The nursery claimed they had sold the car to the guy, and "We're not responsible." My brother went to the DMV and had to pay to get the ownership records himself, as proof that they were the registered owners. He had to pay to file the claim in small claims court. He had to pay to have them served with a summons. They didn't show up to court, so he won. He sent them several letters, never got an acknowledgement or a dime from them.
He went back to court a few months later with delivery receipts of the letters he had sent. He had to buy something from the nursery with a check so that he could figure out where their bank account was and what the number was. Once he had this information, he ask the court for a garnishment. It was granted, he went to the bank, and got about half of what he was owed because they didn't have enough in the account to cover the full amount. Another round of registered letters, another trip back to court, another garnishment, and he finally got to their bank account at a time when they had enough money to cover what he was owed and all the additional costs he had accrued trying to collect the money.
This is the same wherever you go, and it even will work in your favor if you get sued. Just don't pay, and it can take months or years for them to get the money out of you, if they ever get it. Now, there is of course no guarentee you won't eventually piss some judge off and have a warrant issued for you.
disable SMS for a short while.
Most mailing list unsubscribe you if your messages bounce for some limit.
Inconveniet yes, but it should work.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
IANAL, so I don't really know how well this will work.
I routinely handle complaints on behalf of my customers with their vendors. Some vendors, such as Verio, are beyond awful to work with based on my experience. Some vendors know me by name if enough of my clients have issues with them :-). I will outline my techniques for the common benefit of the readers.
My typical procedure (first week):
1. Contact first level personnel for about 3 days and gather employee IDs and case numbers.
2. Cease talking with first level and skip directly to first level supervisors confronting them with evidence. Do so for 1 day, on the 3rd day with at least 2 calls documenting the supervisor employee ID and case numbers.
3. Cease talking with supervisors and skip directly to second level supervisors. Do so for 1 day similar to 1st level.
4. Advise the second level supervisor that if the problem is not handled within the next 24 hours (the 5th day), the next directive will be received from his manager, ignore the laughter if any insues.
5. Follow up the next day (by then you should have a direct line) and remind him that the problem still exists.
Begin corporate level follow ups as follows (second week, generally 2 to 3 days):
1. Look up the company's corporate records for the following:
a) The front desk phone number
b) The Investor Relations (or any other PR function) - optional, never used it
c) The legal counsel of the company - optional, never used it
d) The company's mailing address for the HQ
2. Contact the front desk and ask to be transferred to the Office of the President/CEO. It's really none of their business to know why, but be candid and polite.
3. Believe it or not, most of the time you will in fact reach the executive assistant or someone whose job is specifically to resolve stretched out problems. Once you reach that person, obtain their direct number, e-mail, fax, and mailing address. Be prepared to send a ton of evidence of wrongdoing. The people at the top generally will have the organization chart available and know the executive in charge of that particular part of the company.
4. If you are lucky, and most of the time you won't be, you'll be given contact information for that particular executive. The executives are extremely busy people, so you'll likely talk to his assistant instead. Most of the time, however, it's not really necessary.
5. Be prepared for very different treatment the next time you call the customer service department as your name will be quite well known around the company. A simple memo from about 4-5 management levels down advising on how to deal with your problem carries infinitely more weight than any insult you can come up with.
Yes, I get results fast and this kind of work generally costs the client about $1200 or so. In fact, I once got a Nortel Regional VP in charge of my area to contact me within literally 40 minutes of me reaching just the front desk at Nortel to resolve a vendor issue. The vendor subsequently lost their authorization from Nortel.
Does this sound like overkill? Try to call Yahoo front desk, ask for Office of CEO, and present your case. Internal pressure is very effective.
Oh yeah, the mailing address is for the thank you letter along with hard copies of the evidence.
Enjoy!
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Wow.. Can you add any more variables to that case? Illegal immigrant, no license, nursery without sufficient funds to cover costs, ...
I never said it would be a one-day, zero expense endeavour, but it certainly doesn't involve a Columbo-esque plot or a potential international incident.
Moreover; press attention would do wonders for this case. Yahoo! doesn't want their name smeared rightly across the headlines for something they could settle for $200. In all likelyhood they'd pay the money to get rid of you. They'll waste large amounts of legal funding on cases that matter.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
A bank (Nation's Bank I think) called my cell phone one time. They claimed they "must have been given a wrong number" but the lady knew my name, so I wasn't buying it. I have no accounts with them, nor have I ever given out my cell to any companies. So I asked to speak with her manager. I happily told them that it was illegal to solicit to cell phones. They tried to feed me some more BS, so I asked for her manager. I finally got to someone decently high up, and they must have just been too busy to care, because they just said "send us a bill."
So, I itemized the lost minutes, as well as about an hour's worth of lost wages (this was during work) and sent it off. Sure enough, about two weeks later I got a check in the mail.
Needless to say, I didn't cash it...it makes a good story. Plus, my coworkers thought I was crazy when I was on the phone.