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 testing.
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.
I worked for an Australian insurance company and we physically DDOSed a poor man's real mailbox with printed policy documents as we used their address during e2e testing and we mistakenly didn't put a testing flag somewhere.
The documents pack is like an A4 folder 1cm thick. He received close to 100 in one day. Enough for his mailbox to get full and for the postie to dump most of it on the lawn
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.
Someone I know who works at a telco (no idea if Vodafone is a thing in Belgium, but whatever: not Vodafone) was talking about a number someone has: 0411 11 11 11, and they got over a hundred operator messages every day.
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.
In my first job we had warehouse management system, and for testing new versions we allowed users to log-in to test environment.
Some employees didn't knew they were supposed to only log in to prod and happily worked in their warehouse accepting deliveries, stocktaking, moving stuff in real world using test db instead of the prod one. We only realized when they moved so much stuff that the inconsistencies db vs reality triggered alarms.
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.
Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)
At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.
Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.
So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.
Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.
It's 64 kbps (hopefully) with quality of service, and very often still with per-minute billing paid to the receiving carrier, whether it runs over actual circuit-switched hardware or not.
> Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.
Well, not with that attitude! Initiate a 139-party conference call from your phone and you'll just about make it.
Back in 2017-8 I've got a four consequent top ups of an equivalent of $50 each (so a total of $200) from an unknown source. After that I've got a call from a resident cell number saying I've got a $200 fine for watching porn that I laughed off and hung up. I thought it was a scam to make me pay the "fine" with the money I've just got and then call the operator, tell them they "mistakenly" paid for the wrong number (four times for $50, lol) and get the money back. So I sat there and waited for the money to be recalled... but it never happened.
My theory is that it was exactly then I was changing operators while keeping my number, so the scammers tried complaining to the wrong one and failed. Not that I had any objections for the 2 years of free calls and data this got me but this still is a bit of mystery to me.
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.
> Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.
For more than six months now, s.o. is (perhaps accidentally) paying my mobile bill. I have two sim cards, one is data, almost unused. Called the operator twice, concerned that a granny is messing the user ID, or that s.o. is trying to impersonate me by paying the bills and then claiming ownership. Two times reps. assure me that they have no clue who does the payment as it arrives from a partner network taking cash payments only, and that it is impossible for anyone person to claim ownership of the SIM.
And while the amount is not a large one, it is still very suspicious this keeps going on, even after two very long calls with the support. I'm going to soon speak to the partner network, but it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money. They're only there to take it.
Not exactly the same, but "sb." and "sth." are common abbreviations in dictionaries, e.g. "to meet sb." or "to pick sth. up". To those familiar with this convention, "s.o." can generally be inferred from context.
> it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money
After we bought our house, the property tax was still billed to the previous owner for some time. We called our local city hall, and their answer was basically "just talk to the previous owner and pay the tax for them, we don't care where the money comes from".
> it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money
Why should they be?
In more than a few jurisdictions you can pay utilities or property taxes via an online portal without logging in. You just pull up a property, click "make a payment", and enter an amount along with a payment method into the portal. If you were to use a gift card for a utility payment I believe all they'd have is a browser fingerprint and an IP address. But why should that be an issue?
well... imagine this - you are a concert agency, then some promoter comes, and hires you to do this hall and this artist. you do, it sells out, the room is near empty.
should you be concerned where did the money come and go?
Frankly - how many phone calls do you really make and take these days?
It's vanishingly rare for me. I got a call from a friend today - but I think I otherwise only make or receive a legit phone call every few days. We use social media mostly. Work "calls" are on apps.
A family could probably get away with 2 phones easily, as long as they have home internet.
Now... When I was young and internet was over dial-up, having a single phone line for our whole family caused quite a lot of spats.
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
I assume it's a deliberate choice. Where I live these old prepaid contracts are still available next to the offerings you describe and are preferred by some older people and minimalists.
In Poland, I pay 25pln (~$7) per month for unlimited calling and texting + 24GB[1] per month I think.
The fun part is that the data rolls over, so I have something like 4TB of unused data right now, + whatever the special bonus pool I get with each top-up.
The gotcha of this promo is that it all resets back to 0 if you forget to top up even once. I put one over on them though, my bank has an "auto top-up" feature, which is completely free, and of which I'm a very happy customer.
[1] It's 15GB for the first month of the promotion and then it rises by 1GB each month until some cap. Not sure exactly what the cap is though, as the data rolls over and I'm using some each month, so it's very hard to keep track of.
ALDI TALK offers EU-wide unlimited calls & SMS with 60 GB of data for 69.99 EUR per year. That is 5.80 EUR per month for unlimited calls/SMS and 5 GB of data [0]. I switched last year from O2 (they use the same network) after I realized that I only used more than 3 GB of data in two months during the last 3 years. I essentially cut my mobile phone costs by 70% for the same service. Compare to the O2 bloatware, the ALDI web interface is lightweight, fast and simple.
For 8.25 EUR/month, you get 250 GB of data per year, and for 12.40 EUR 450 GB/year.
The grocery store plans are fine. There aren't any QoS tiers on mobile data networks in Germany to my knowledge, so the prioritization you get is just as good or bad as the 100€/month corporate plan sharing the same cell tower with you.
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.
> My family and I share a single mobile phone. To be more precise, we share two sim cards which move between a nearly 10 year old Samsung smartphone and a dumb flip phone depending on the present circumstances.
This seems like some sort of punishment those monks that stand in one place and pray until their feet wear holes in the floor would use. Mint Mobile is like $15 a month.
If my choice were to worry about first-tier direct customers kicking me off cell towers at stadiums and public events, or worry about whether wife-husband-son SIM card would make it home in time for my work trip, it would be a pretty easy one.
oh vodafone spam offer writer, i can feel your coded warmth through your persistence and unsuccessful earnesty. maybe one day through your shy facade i can receive an offer to redeem one evening i can think fondly of for the rest of my life
Alternatively, it was a spoofed website using a spoofed SMS message/sender, trying to get them to click on the website link and give up their login. ;)
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 testing.
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...
I worked for an Australian insurance company and we physically DDOSed a poor man's real mailbox with printed policy documents as we used their address during e2e testing and we mistakenly didn't put a testing flag somewhere.
Our CTO had to personally apologise to him
This sounds hilarious, how many physical items are we talking? Like his whole front porch full up of contract boxes?
The documents pack is like an A4 folder 1cm thick. He received close to 100 in one day. Enough for his mailbox to get full and for the postie to dump most of it on the lawn
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.
0412 345 678
That was one number we were told to stop using at Internode. I heard similar stories from Optus and Telstra employees.
Someone I know who works at a telco (no idea if Vodafone is a thing in Belgium, but whatever: not Vodafone) was talking about a number someone has: 0411 11 11 11, and they got over a hundred operator messages every day.
see also:
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/special-delivery
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.
Testing vs prod bugs are always FUN.
In my first job we had warehouse management system, and for testing new versions we allowed users to log-in to test environment.
Some employees didn't knew they were supposed to only log in to prod and happily worked in their warehouse accepting deliveries, stocktaking, moving stuff in real world using test db instead of the prod one. We only realized when they moved so much stuff that the inconsistencies db vs reality triggered alarms.
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.
Where I live, all five providers I’ve examined advertise their home broadband plans as unlimited, but four have a limit (mostly called a “fair use policy”) between 3.3 and 3.5 TB, after which they’ll be shaped to 1 Mbps. Suspiciously colludy. (The fifth: “These are unlimited plans for home use only. You can consume unlimited data at high speed. However, [we] may discontinue the data services in case of misuse, fraudulent, unauthorised or commercial use.”)
At 50 Mbps, you can theoretically exhaust this in just over six days. At 1 Gbps, it takes less than eight hours.
Once shaped—a month of 1 Mbps is less than 335 GB.
So in practice all these unlimiteds boil down to less than 4TB/month.
Wish the FCC had listened to us when Comcast first introduced their first very high bandwidth cap in their first market. (Must’ve been more than a decade ago, maybe and a half.) We knew how bad it was in Canada.
From the screenshot it looks like he actually received "only" around 2TB of free mobile data.
It's 64 kbps (hopefully) with quality of service, and very often still with per-minute billing paid to the receiving carrier, whether it runs over actual circuit-switched hardware or not.
> Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.
Well, not with that attitude! Initiate a 139-party conference call from your phone and you'll just about make it.
Back in 2017-8 I've got a four consequent top ups of an equivalent of $50 each (so a total of $200) from an unknown source. After that I've got a call from a resident cell number saying I've got a $200 fine for watching porn that I laughed off and hung up. I thought it was a scam to make me pay the "fine" with the money I've just got and then call the operator, tell them they "mistakenly" paid for the wrong number (four times for $50, lol) and get the money back. So I sat there and waited for the money to be recalled... but it never happened.
My theory is that it was exactly then I was changing operators while keeping my number, so the scammers tried complaining to the wrong one and failed. Not that I had any objections for the 2 years of free calls and data this got me but this still is a bit of mystery to me.
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.
The article was pretty clear about this:
> Before I continue, I will answer the obvious question: Did I actually receive 999999 minutes? Yes, indeed I did. But unfortunately, I was only given 7200 minutes to spend my 999999 minutes and I could only spend them 1 minute at a time.
I would’ve enjoyed starting a conference call and adding multiple people in, breaking away from the 1 minute at a time limit.
And no explanation what happens after that with the minutes they had before.
& the closer:
>For five days I had a million minutes and I was possibly the first and only Vodafone minute millionaire
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?
You can cancel immediately after subscribing. You will keep access until the end of the trial period and will not be billed.
For more than six months now, s.o. is (perhaps accidentally) paying my mobile bill. I have two sim cards, one is data, almost unused. Called the operator twice, concerned that a granny is messing the user ID, or that s.o. is trying to impersonate me by paying the bills and then claiming ownership. Two times reps. assure me that they have no clue who does the payment as it arrives from a partner network taking cash payments only, and that it is impossible for anyone person to claim ownership of the SIM.
And while the amount is not a large one, it is still very suspicious this keeps going on, even after two very long calls with the support. I'm going to soon speak to the partner network, but it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money. They're only there to take it.
What does SO stand for here? I assumed Significant Other but that doesn’t square with the story as surely you’d just ask
s.o. = someone
I have lived for at least a long while with the impression it is common abbreviation :D
It's a common abbreviation for significant other, i.e. one's husband/wife or partner, but never seen it abbreviate "someone" before.
"someone?"
this makes the most sense but i have never in my life seen someone abbreviate someone as SO, haha.
They're probably French, the French are always writing qqn and qqch for "quelqu'un" and "quelque chose".
A couple other small tells, although very fluent... "enterprise" instead of "business", etc.
Not exactly the same, but "sb." and "sth." are common abbreviations in dictionaries, e.g. "to meet sb." or "to pick sth. up". To those familiar with this convention, "s.o." can generally be inferred from context.
xkcd 10000 :)
> it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money
After we bought our house, the property tax was still billed to the previous owner for some time. We called our local city hall, and their answer was basically "just talk to the previous owner and pay the tax for them, we don't care where the money comes from".
Pecunia non olet.
> it is appalling how much these people are not interested in who actually gives their enterprise money
Why should they be?
In more than a few jurisdictions you can pay utilities or property taxes via an online portal without logging in. You just pull up a property, click "make a payment", and enter an amount along with a payment method into the portal. If you were to use a gift card for a utility payment I believe all they'd have is a browser fingerprint and an IP address. But why should that be an issue?
well... imagine this - you are a concert agency, then some promoter comes, and hires you to do this hall and this artist. you do, it sells out, the room is near empty.
should you be concerned where did the money come and go?
any chance someone who knows you is simply paying your bill out of kindness?
I'm even more intrigued by the whole family sharing two phones and switching sim cards. What's the reason behind it? How does it work?
Dylan is the sort of computer person who was like "fuck this crap" and went into farming. I'm surprised they still update their blog.
Probably practicing minimalism
Frankly - how many phone calls do you really make and take these days?
It's vanishingly rare for me. I got a call from a friend today - but I think I otherwise only make or receive a legit phone call every few days. We use social media mostly. Work "calls" are on apps.
A family could probably get away with 2 phones easily, as long as they have home internet.
Now... When I was young and internet was over dial-up, having a single phone line for our whole family caused quite a lot of spats.
My guess is personal and business number on different sims. Then just swap the devices that’s in. They don’t like being connected all the time.
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 :)
This is 100% a function of how well equipped a country's telco regulator is. Bad regulators will let companies have monopolies, good ones don't.
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
I assume it's a deliberate choice. Where I live these old prepaid contracts are still available next to the offerings you describe and are preferred by some older people and minimalists.
In Poland, I pay 25pln (~$7) per month for unlimited calling and texting + 24GB[1] per month I think.
The fun part is that the data rolls over, so I have something like 4TB of unused data right now, + whatever the special bonus pool I get with each top-up.
The gotcha of this promo is that it all resets back to 0 if you forget to top up even once. I put one over on them though, my bank has an "auto top-up" feature, which is completely free, and of which I'm a very happy customer.
[1] It's 15GB for the first month of the promotion and then it rises by 1GB each month until some cap. Not sure exactly what the cap is though, as the data rolls over and I'm using some each month, so it's very hard to keep track of.
Germany is more expensive (unless you go with a phone contract from the local grocery store - which I've heard mixed reviews about)
ALDI TALK offers EU-wide unlimited calls & SMS with 60 GB of data for 69.99 EUR per year. That is 5.80 EUR per month for unlimited calls/SMS and 5 GB of data [0]. I switched last year from O2 (they use the same network) after I realized that I only used more than 3 GB of data in two months during the last 3 years. I essentially cut my mobile phone costs by 70% for the same service. Compare to the O2 bloatware, the ALDI web interface is lightweight, fast and simple.
For 8.25 EUR/month, you get 250 GB of data per year, and for 12.40 EUR 450 GB/year.
[0] https://www.alditalk.de/jahres-paket
The grocery store plans are fine. There aren't any QoS tiers on mobile data networks in Germany to my knowledge, so the prioritization you get is just as good or bad as the 100€/month corporate plan sharing the same cell tower with you.
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
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.
We are all truely blessed on this reveived day.
Can.. I'm very confused, why is Vodafone selling and giving people chunks of data and minutes over such short time periods? Does not compute.
telecom cartels in Greece :)
> My family and I share a single mobile phone. To be more precise, we share two sim cards which move between a nearly 10 year old Samsung smartphone and a dumb flip phone depending on the present circumstances.
This seems like some sort of punishment those monks that stand in one place and pray until their feet wear holes in the floor would use. Mint Mobile is like $15 a month.
OK, Ryan Reynolds
No, you're right.
If my choice were to worry about first-tier direct customers kicking me off cell towers at stadiums and public events, or worry about whether wife-husband-son SIM card would make it home in time for my work trip, it would be a pretty easy one.
Ewww to this idea, tell me it wasn't the same engagement hacking that leads YouTubers to mispronouncing common words.
“Hey, give people a billion dollars of credits for the next 17 seconds. Oh!, make it look like a mistake too!”
oh vodafone spam offer writer, i can feel your coded warmth through your persistence and unsuccessful earnesty. maybe one day through your shy facade i can receive an offer to redeem one evening i can think fondly of for the rest of my life
I think one can only hope to reveive such an offer
Alternatively, it was a spoofed website using a spoofed SMS message/sender, trying to get them to click on the website link and give up their login. ;)