Text messaging advertising is another way that companies can advertise to consumers. Some cell phone users are starting to receive a lot of text messaging advertising. Frankly many people find it is quite annoying. These messages take time to read and delete. They are potentially using up some of your incoming message quota for text messages every month. If you have an unlimited plan, they you probably do not care quite so much. They even come in during the middle of the night which used to wake us up. Now we leave the phone downstairs were we cannot hear it in the middle of the night. Many mobile owners will turn their phones to private mode at night if they do not want to be disturbed.
Text Messaging Advertising And Your Phone Number
The writer made the mistake of giving out their cell phone number once to a company who then sold the number to an advertiser. Selling numbers to advertisers apparently occurs all of the time. This advertiser began sending text messages to my phone at really odd hours. I now leave my phone down stairs at night so that it does not wake me up. I will still hear it if it rings and if it is an urgent call.
Fortunately I also have an unlimited incoming text message plan so do not need to worry about how many text messaging advertising messages I actually receive. If I had a limited plan, I would have to do something about this problem. These messages eat into your monthly quota and can cause a problem for many people.
Short Code Text Messages
There are also text messages which are called “short code text messages”. and each time you receive one your account is charged $2.00. This is an outrageous amount to charge for an alert message that you did not want and did not order. There may be some alert messages that might be worth this kind of money. I do not know what they would be. I certainly do not want them. In my mind this is really a scam and they should be disallowed! The phone company makes a lot of money from them and does nothing to stop them unless you call them to have these type of messages blocked.
In the mean time, call your mobile provider and have them block these kinds of test messages from being received by your phone. This is the only way to block text messaging advertising of this type. You have to have specific numbers to block which you can do with short code text messaging.
Not sure if I can ask my carrier to block text messaging advertising in general from being received by my phone. If this could be put in place, it would be really appreciated by many consumers, but the carriers would lose a lot of revenue if they did block them so I really do not think that they will take the step to block general text messaging advertising.
Does anyone know if this is possible. If you do have some idea regarding blocking these kids of text messaging, leave us a comment and instructions on how to go about this.
For more about text messages, click here.