Today is Saturday, I just switched to the Samsung Fascinate on Thursday. Five minutes after walking out of the store, I received text messages from this crazy looking number. This is what the text message said from number: 118012222269:
//BREW:0104F4BC
ZMAILCI=AC56141A9E1A9E86422DE614E9D3B167 MC=1 To stop these messages simply reply to this one (charge may apply)
I am officially at 41 messages from this number, I tried replying 1 to stop, stop, etc. With no luck whatsoever. I think turned to Verizon customer service. The first CSR that I spoke to, told me to try texting "stop all" to the number, and told me that I have had premium messaging disabled since 2010 and that it was not a premium message so that I would not be charged. I tried this, and that did not stop the messages.
My second call to Verizon customer service, the lady told me to block messages from emails and web, that did not work either. So I just reactivated it after I was still continuing to receive the messages. She said that my only other option would be to change my phone number. I am not sure in what world people live in that changing your number is something you just want to do, but my phone is connected to all my friends, ever bill, or account that I have, this is not a convenient and in my opinion even possible option for me.
For my third call to customer service, after the blocking messages did not work, I went to Google before hand, where I found this website (http://800notes.com/Phone.aspx/1-801-222-2269/4) where it shows that this problem is extremely widespread. It goes from possible phishing to a problem from switching to a regular phone to a smart phone. According to the website, it says that when you change from a regular phone to a smart phone, the mobile email that you had on the regular phone, is not deactivated and is still attempting to push email to your phone. One option is to change the passwords to your email addresses. I tried this, but because one of my emails is a school email address I am unable to change it. Still the messages come. So when I called for the third time, I told the CSR that I needed to remove mobile email from my account, explaining all of the above to her. She said that I would have to deactivate my new phone, reactivate my old, cancel mobile mail, and then reactivate my phone. I did that, this did not work. Still receiving messages.
I went back to the internet, and attempted blocking the number with out the first two 1's, as some had said this had worked for them. And it did...for like five minutes, and then I received another message. But now, I can no longer send texts. I am getting the Verizon text messages, I am able to make phone calls, but I am not at all able to send text messages. Everytime that I do, it says failure. I have tried texting different people, on different carriers, none of it works.
My FOURTH phone call to Verizon customer service, I told the CSR all of the above, and she said that they would not be able to trouble shoot from my phone, because I was on it. This is the only phone that I have, I do not own a land line, or anything else. So the only way that I will be able to hopefully get my phone to allow me to send text messages, is to go to someone else's house and use their phone, or find some other way to get a phone.
Needless to say I am very annoyed, maybe even past annoyed at this point. I also sent a message under the contact us portion of Verizon's website, as Verizon would not allow me to get through to a person on my fifth call, because I was calling from my mobile phone. I am not saying that the customer service people that I spoke to were not nice and friendly, they def. were, and they were trying to be as helpful as possible, as far as I can tell. My irritation is that there is a whole website dedicated to this problem, and each person has been given a different solution, some of which work for some of the people, and then others that have had to do multiple things. Some people were able to get it to stop just by responding stop. I have tried every option that is currently available to me except for disabling text messages and switching my phone number, which are completely out of the question. So my question is, WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON!?!
How is it possible that there is no solution?!?!
