Back in March I received a bunch of random greeting messages from Kiwi mobile phones, all in painful yoof-txt-speak. I wondered at the way my relatively new cell number received four different messages from four different numbers in one weekend – a statistical anomaly that hasn’t repeated since.
Until this weekend, when I received three, all from different 021 numbers, all content-free variations on “hey, who’s this?”. Still I wonder exactly where this is coming from – is it really, as it seems, just random kids punching numbers at random into their mobiles in the hope of finding someone to chat to? If so, why do I get four in one weekend, then one or two in six months, then three in another weekend? The odds against that distribution seem small.
But that’s not why I was prompted to make this post.
I just got via email from Telecom NZ’s mobile messaging service a notification that I had been sent a picture from a Telecom NZ mobile. I clicked through the link to xtra’s Lightsurf and get this:
—
To: [my gmail address]
From: [a telecom number]
Sent: 01/10/06
Subject: A Picture Share!
—
So, anyone know who these pouting fourteen-year-olds are and why I received a photo of them?
Are we going for the bored-teenagers-spamming-random-identities explanation or the inexplicable-moneymaking-scheme explanation this time? Or is this just a sign that I am not Up With The Play, in the same way that little old ladies are confused by Nigerian scam emails?
I am baffled. Advice welcome.
13 thoughts on “Sup hu dizb: part the two-th”
Comments are closed.
Dunno. Texting is a mysterious thing to us older generation folk.
I got two texts one weekend from guys who swore I’d given them my number at some time (one even called me ‘Kate’). I swear I hadn’t.
It happened to be the weekend we’d put an ad in the paper for a new flatmate with my cellphone number and name…… So watch out for THAT scheme from creepy men.
But that doesn’t seem to be YOUR issue.
Maybe they saw you playing ultimate and think you are teh h0t.
How long have you had the number?
Maybe it used to belong to someone they know?
Yup, I’d vote for David’s explanation as the most likely. Numbers do get reassigned eventually, so chances are your number used to belong to a good friend of Ms Pouty and Ms Eyeliner there.
Mind you, that doesn’t fully explain the “who is this?” messages. Maybe you should contact your service provider and ask them to check it out?
Sorry, David and Johnnie – it was sent not to my phone number but to my gmail address. (Which is both non-NZ specific and definitely unprecedented.)
Unless they sent it to my cell number and my cell number automatically diverted it to my email address because it’s sitting there in vodafone’s records? Hmm.
It’s probably fishing for a response so they can establish that the email address is live. Known-live addresses are worth more to spammers.
dude this weekend I got a text hit by a guy who and I quote
“LIKES BOYZ BOYZ BOYZ”
then when I asked who he was prompted with
“Robbie”
then
“I’m gay” (didnt see that one)
So I sent back a reply saying
Good for you.
not a lot happened after that. but i know mine is a new number never used before. Whats with this.
Are we finally, offically old.
the dark haired ones not a bad pouter……….
Ivan – that’s one of the theories that I was bandying about for the ‘sup hu dizb’ texts – that they were trying to establish if phone numbers were live so they could target them for text spam.
It was something I considered again for the photo but it doesn’t explain the photo too well, I think. If it’s fishing for confirmation, why is it a phone text from a New Zealand number? There’s nothing marking my gmail as a NZ identity – and if the email was located online somewhere in a list of NZ identities (possible, I enter it on online forms almost recklessly because gmail’s so good at filtering spam) then surely that’s all the confirmation needed?
I think I’m gonna have to call the number and see who answers.
I called the number. No answer, the message identified the phone’s owner (I won’t put the name here). Didn’t leave a message, because, huh, what on earth would I say?
Perhaps the photo was a fishing attempt from Congressman Mark Foley, to see if you were a teenage boy..?
Well, that time I got through and spoke to the girl in question, who seemed surprised and embarrassed. Some kind of mix-up, it seems. I didn’t feel comfortable pressing for details because she was so obviously on the back foot.
So, what are the odds of someone in NZ sending a picture text to the wrong gmail.com address – and having it still end up in NZ? Slim, I would imagine. Very, very slim.
The fact that your email address is a word in the English language rather than a name with a couple of numbers after it probably increases the odds of this sort of thing happening to you.