Another Valentine’s Day has passed and everyone knows that there are certain guidelines that should be followed on this day of love. Over the years, I've developed a top three list of recommendations:
• Don’t forget Valentine’s Day.
• Don’t forget to get in touch with your loved ones.
• Don’t open any strange email attachments, not even if they seem to come from a secret admirer and have a special greeting card attached.
But after the stories I heard this year around Valentine’s Day, it appears I'll need to add new advice to my top three list. Apparently many people received a suspicious text message on their mobile phone this Valentine’s Day. The text message came from an online love message service, which lets you record a message onto a central voice recording machine that can be dialed into. The service then sends a timed SMS to your friend, who can collect the recorded message by calling a number. Of course you have to pay around US$ 4 per minute for recording and collecting the messages.
The suspicious part was that no matter what number you typed in for collection, you always got the same recorded message from an unknown woman. So either some girl felt really lonely and spent quite a lot of money to send numerous text messages to random numbers, or someone was just trying to get your money.
Therefore, please add the following advice to my top three list: "Don’t respond to strange requests to call premium service numbers." If you want to be pedantic and argue that it is no longer a top three list because there are now four items, then I have to tell you that I’m a techie and, therefore, the list counting starts with zero.