Mtweeter seems Scammish

The phone is a pretty personal thing, very much like the internet but closer to you. It is very much like a home...  So imagine some person, walking into your house, smiling at you and telling you he's taken some loose change you left in your room. You yell at him, he waves and runs off.

Now the very next week, he comes back and does it again!

Dad has been plagued by mtweeter feeds that charge him RM2.00 every week for a service he has neither used nor signed up for in the first place. The instructions to stop the feed doesn't work as sending it yields no results and you're only informed of it the next week when you're hit with another RM2.00 charge.

Personally I find this to be a little unscrupulous, its like skimming their userbase to earn a few bucks here and there. It can grow to quite a large sum if left unchecked. Imagine (taking my dad as a case study), he received the charge, he doesn't know what to do. He tries to stop it, but only finds out he fails a week later. Thats RM4 now. All in all, by the time he roped me into helping him stop this, he's already spent an average of RM10. This is non inclusive of any charges for sending the 'stop' messages. I'm not sure if that incurs charged.

So that is RM10 earned off a single user for nothing. Now imagine doing that to your entire population of users... that amount is quite a whopper.

I checked around and it seems that Maxis IS doing this a lot of its client database. Check out the discussion at their facebook discussion page... theres a lot of disgruntled peeps out there that are being afflicted by mtweeter and a number of different 'Maxis' services. The facebook page is quite a god-send as no company can afford to ignore public complaints for too long. The fact that they can't censor facebook also adds to the transparency in handling customer related problems. Usually feedback forms sent thru websites are usually sucks into a swirling vortex never to be seen again til months later when you've already discontinued the provider. To be fair, the chaps manning the facebook page seem to be pretty efficient and patient in handling the disgruntled online customers.

But it makes me wonder if Maxis is indeed leaking private information or using client databases to send spam to the public.

I would love to see a feature that prevented this from happening... something like Google's Spam block which would automatically block numbers that users define are spam. I'm quite sick of offers to have sex with strange women or to look at their pictures of them having fun being sent to my phone.