This one is new to me, and I can't find anything about it online as yet, so I'm writing up what happened and what I think it's all about.
I had 3 SMS / text messages to my mobile phone in fairly quick succession. Each one came from a sender identified only as Sender: Samsung with no reply telephone number included.
The messages all say the following:
[FreeMsg] Your payment code is UK*** or click this link to complete your transaction http://europe.ipx.com/pfi/******************** (each * replaces one character in the code and the URL) and in each message the payment code differed but the URL transaction number stayed the same, so it was clearly sent 3 times by the system.
Now what I think would have happened, if I had clicked that link, is that I would have been charged for a service against my mobile phone account, even though I haven't bought anything, wouldn't have received anything, and probably would never know what I had paid for!
Someone would have had something paid for by me and charged to my mobile phone account!!!
This is clearly some sort of scam where one person uses the phone number of another to get goods or services by deception. It may be a ringtone, music, airtime, or even mobile broadband, it might be cinema tickets or food, or goods, who knows!!!
It relies on human curiosity to work though as, if you click the URL link to find out what the message is all about, you appear to be authorising the payment and your phone account could be charged!!!
The technology behind this appears to be the much vaunted Ericsson IPX payment system
http://www.ericsson.com/ourportfolio/ipx where you can use your mobile phone to pay for various services, but I doubt Ericsson ever expected it to be abused in this manner so that one phone user would be billed for another user's purchases like this!
This needs to be publicised widely to warn mobile phone users not to click on links received via text messages for payments unless they are absolutely sure it is something they have bought themselves!
