{"id":92199,"date":"2013-11-22T14:04:35","date_gmt":"2013-11-22T12:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=92199"},"modified":"2013-11-22T14:13:38","modified_gmt":"2013-11-22T12:13:38","slug":"bizarre-sms-flood-hits-user","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/banking\/92199-bizarre-sms-flood-hits-user.html","title":{"rendered":"Bizarre SMS flood hits user"},"content":{"rendered":"

Your smartphone can be spammed with SMS messages to the point that it significantly affects battery life, Jan Gutter has discovered in the past week.<\/p>\n

Gutter said he has been receiving text messages from Standard Bank since Tuesday, 12 November 2013 telling him he\u2019s logged into his account.<\/p>\n

The problem? He\u2019s not a Standard Bank customer. That and he received a message almost every minute on average.<\/p>\n

According to Gutter, by 16:38 on Thursday, 21 November 2013, he had received 11,479 messages; roughly 48 messages per hour (0.8 per minute).<\/p>\n

The deluge not only left him “slightly frazzled”, Gutter said, but also essentially unable to use SMS as a communications mechanism on his phone.<\/p>\n

When the SMS spam first started, Gutter said he contacted the Standard Bank call centre, where he was assured that the issue would be handed off to the technical department.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next day, the nightmare started,\u201d Gutter said. \u201cThe SMSes started coming every 45 seconds and kept coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

He phoned the call centre again, spent more time on hold and eventually got cut off, Gutter said.<\/p>\n

Since then he has repeatedly tried to get support from Standard Bank, sending at least 6 e-mails, making 3 phone calls, and posting on HelloPeter.com.<\/p>\n

His complaint on HelloPeter eventually resulted in a return call from Standard Bank, whose first reaction was that his number might be linked to one of their customer\u2019s accounts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis argument was patently laughable,\u201d Gutter said. \u201cIt would mean that a user is trying to log in to their account every 45 seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gutter was then offered an alternative explanation: that someone else has the same number as he does.<\/p>\n

How this would cause the problem he is experiencing isn\u2019t clear, and Gutter said he found this alternate reason as implausible as the first.<\/p>\n

\"Smartphone

“Shut up already!”<\/p><\/div>\n

After some days had passed, Gutter said he received a call from Standard Bank saying that they have identified the issue as an error on their system.<\/p>\n

The issue would only be passed on to Standard Bank\u2019s technical team \u201clater this week\u201d (18\u201322 November 2013), Gutter said a bank customer service representative told him.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, Gutter has capitalised on one of the benefits of using an Android smartphone and has switched to using the new Google Hangouts application to handle his SMS messages.<\/p>\n

This lets him mute certain numbers, but unfortunately doesn\u2019t help save his battery, which Gutter says only lasted half a day while the stream of messages poured in.<\/p>\n

While not ideal, Gutter said he also eventually asked Vodacom to block the three numbers from which he was receiving this torrent of SMS messages.<\/p>\n

This could prevent legitimate transaction messages sent to him from Standard Bank customers, Gutter said, but by this stage it was a side-effect he was willing to live with.<\/p>\n

On the morning of Friday, 22 November 2013, Gutter said that it seemed as though the SMS messages had stopped the previous afternoon at 16:38.<\/p>\n

Standard Bank claimed responsibility for eventually stopping the SMS flood, saying that one of their customers seemed to have put the wrong number in their online banking profile.<\/p>\n

According to the bank the problem is not with their systems, but possibly on their client’s PC which appears to be constantly logging into and out of Standard Bank’s online banking system.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the bank told MyBroadband that they are trying to contact their client to let them know about the problem.<\/p>\n

More on banking and banking fraud in South Africa<\/h3>\n

Debit card fraud losses down: SABRIC<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Online banking fraud \u2013 is your bank doing enough to protect you?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Cheapest bank accounts in SA revealed<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

FNB plans to launch mobile operator: sources<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Internet banking fraud and spyware in SA<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A technical glitch has resulted in what is essentially an SMS denial-of-service attack on an unfortunate cellular subscriber<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":79185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10106],"tags":[19508,35,1507,16468,21163,1851],"class_list":["post-92199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-banking","tag-google-hangouts","tag-headline","tag-hellopeter","tag-jan-gutter","tag-short-message-service-sms","tag-standard-bank"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92199"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92199"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92260,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92199\/revisions\/92260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}