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You Just Reveived

dylan.gr

31–40 of 78 posts

Re: You Just Reveived

#31

It said "for five days". So I'd assume those minutes/data will only last for that period of time. So I'd imagine this is like when I go to Amazon every X+n months and it tries to reel me back in with a free month of prime. They're giving you freebies to use, to establish habits which they can then profit from later down the line.

I rely on those free months of prime. I don't order from Amazon often but when I do next day shipping is great. Just gotta set a reminder to cancel.

Cancel right away? Or are Amazon subs different?

Re: You Just Reveived

#33

The "unlimited data" is an interesting contrast and always makes me wonder "at how much speed?" I am more surprised that mobile plans are still charging by the minute. A "toll quality" 64kbps audio stream is 480KB per minute. More advanced codecs use a fraction of that.

From the screenshot it looks like he actually received "only" around 2TB of free mobile data.

Re: You Just Reveived

#34

As someone working for a telco, not Vodafone, this would be my assumptions: A developer mistakenly grabbed a real MSISDN, instead of a QA one, while testing a promo still in development. I only say this because there's no identifier to differenciate a real phone number from a test one. Subscribers often called to report those gibberish text messages they received. It's always a dev entering an incorrect number while…

When I worked for an Australian telco (not Vodafone), some developers on another team had used a very conspicuous mobile phone number in their integration tests, which actually connected to a real SMS service somewhere else in the company. No idea why they would do this. It turned out that this number belonged to a real person, who got absolutely buried in test SMS messages, when the integration tests ran as part of a CI/CD pipeline. The owner raised a complaint to the ombudsman, which led to all kinds of trouble for the developers.

In case anyone else here is curious, the ACMA maintains a list of reserved numbers for use in creative works, which you can use for dummy data: https://www.acma.gov.au/phone-numbers-use-tv-shows-films-and...

Re: You Just Reveived

#35
post #4

Vodafone is quite a pest in terms of spam, leaving them led to two dozen emails, a bunch of SMS and five phone calls. It is not surprising they don't bother to check spelling on their spam anymore. Especially the emails, resending me literally the same offer of a 5€ rebate per month five times is just offensive spam. The other ones were just variations of the same offer with different styling.

T mobile is worse. They send me sms adverts based on the location of my sim card. Even a flip phone doesn't help

Re: You Just Reveived

#36

As someone working for a telco, not Vodafone, this would be my assumptions: A developer mistakenly grabbed a real MSISDN, instead of a QA one, while testing a promo still in development. I only say this because there's no identifier to differenciate a real phone number from a test one. Subscribers often called to report those gibberish text messages they received. It's always a dev entering an incorrect number while…

I was slightly more inclined to think it might be some bored employee somewhere acting in a sort of Robin Hood capacity just because it's unusually accurate and thorough for a test message. I'd expect more like TEST TEST test DFOIUHDFUOHDFOIUHDFROIHDSFOIHDSF LOREM IPSUM 999999.

Sometimes enthusiastic or particularly bored developers do put in the effort to write things out like a real message though.

Re: You Just Reveived

#37
post #4

Vodafone is quite a pest in terms of spam, leaving them led to two dozen emails, a bunch of SMS and five phone calls. It is not surprising they don't bother to check spelling on their spam anymore. Especially the emails, resending me literally the same offer of a 5€ rebate per month five times is just offensive spam. The other ones were just variations of the same offer with different styling.

I got tired of Vodafone's spam and switched to another operator altogether. Vodafone cheapest plan was 6€+VAT and I got the most expensive plan form the other operator at 5€ VAT included which included more benefits. Plus the added bonus of no spam. They just kindly remind you to pay your bill three days before it's due.

Re: You Just Reveived

#38
post #34

As someone working for a telco, not Vodafone, this would be my assumptions: A developer mistakenly grabbed a real MSISDN, instead of a QA one, while testing a promo still in development. I only say this because there's no identifier to differenciate a real phone number from a test one. Subscribers often called to report those gibberish text messages they received. It's always a dev entering an incorrect number while…

When I worked for an Australian telco (not Vodafone), some developers on another team had used a very conspicuous mobile phone number in their integration tests, which actually connected to a real SMS service somewhere else in the company. No idea why they would do this. It turned out that this number belonged to a real person, who got absolutely buried in test SMS messages, when the integration tests ran as part of…

I worked at a grocery retailer, and we had the same exact thing. The CI/CD pipeline was firing out order related SMS messages to a contractor's number during test runs for years.

I wonder how common something like this is.

Re: You Just Reveived

#39
When reading a post like that, I am like "whaaat, people are locked in the 90s?" In France, it is almost unlimited for 20€/month, so very cheap, I do not care / try to optimize that. Happy for you you got unlimited :)

Re: You Just Reveived

#40

When reading a post like that, I am like "whaaat, people are locked in the 90s?" In France, it is almost unlimited for 20€/month, so very cheap, I do not care / try to optimize that. Happy for you you got unlimited :)

In Italy I pay 9.99 for 250GB, unlimited calls and SMS (never sent one in 10+ years but it's nice to have I guess), which for me is basically akin to infinite traffic given that unless I start downloading torrents from 5G I'll never ever run out of traffic ever
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