Having had my phone stolen recently I was left with a few options for a temporary replacement until I got it back today - thanks to a nice, decent couple in Celbridge. Anywaysanall, I narrowed the options down to two old Chinese phones, one with a black strip down the left side of the screen (stood on it in Spain a couple of years ago) and another the brother gave me that appeared to be in good working order... so I selected the latter. I factory reset it from the UI settings menu and loaded the few apps I needed for a few days and went to work Sunday evening...
At some point a pop up came on the screen - The way it works is there's several Xs in the window and clicking one will close the window (which will appear again as and when the phone switches from Network internet to WIFI or between WIFI networks) but clicking any of the others opens a web browser window, the content of which is irrelevant. The way the scam works is a simple tiny piece of text in the popup tells you that by continuing you agree to linked terms and conditions. The terms and conditions are simple enough, it gives the thieves (an outfit called Zamano) permission to programmatically read your phone number and send you as many texts as they like. Each text takes €2.50 from your balance if on prepay or charges it to your account on bill pay.
In my case they sent 8 texts all at the same time, leaving my balance below €2.50. Presumably they would have kept texting if more money was available and would start again next time I topped up or soon thereafter. Anyway I had to top up today to renew my all you can eat, etc with Three so figured I need to put an end to the theiving before doing that. Hence I found this link:
https://community.three.ie/t5/Billpay/Problems-with-57030/td-p/758035On ringing the thieving bastards they immediately undertook to blacklist my number from their "service" and to refund the money they had stolen. Obviously they make their money through people who don't demand refunds and are probably just happy to stop it happening again.
As an aside, factory resetting the phone through the Chineses boot menu removed the malware that wasn't removed through the initial factory reset via the Android UI.
