Well, it began when I heard that you get 5 free sms's if you join this website. So I thought what the hell, also I could sms friends overseas which I might not have been able to SMS from my cell phone. So I signed up. They also allow you to sign up to certain groups like astrology, trivia, and other such useless communities. So each day I would get SMS's pertaining to the one's I ticked. Now I assumed (very wrongly) that these sms's would be under the supposed 5 free sms's you get. The SMS's I received very swiftly become irritating. Eventually I decided to remove myself from them. Let me tell you, from the perspective of someone who uses the internet everyday, that they do not exactly practice navigational ease when it comes to deregistering from them. So I was happy, no more stupid SMS's spamming my cellphone. However, I looked at my cell phone statement later on and saw that they had been billing me R1.75 (US$0.26) PER sms they had sent me. So not only had they annoyed me with stupid SMS's but they had billed me for them as well. I was livid. Unfortunately there is nothing I could do. Anyway I tried to put the incident behind me.

About a month later I started receiving more SMS's from sms.ac - to do with some friend/networking/dating section on their site which they had conveniently placed me on. Again the SMS spam began flowing

e.g.
honeybunny wants to be your friend. Click here to view her profile…..etc

Now these SMS's were annoying the living daylights out of me. I logged in to their site and tried to remove myself from their database. Couldn't be done online, so these irritating SMS's kept flowing. Then I e-mailed them about a week ago asking to be removed and that I thought their business was a disgrace. Anyhow, today I thought I'd have a quick look through my cell phone statement just to make sure everything was in place. And lo and behold - more charges from the cursed sms.ac! They had been charging me the same price for every single annoying SMS that I'd been receiving. And this time it had nothing to do with me, I didn't want to be on their daft network and I didn't want to receive SMS's from arbitrary people (which is probably just them so they can bill your phone). I can honestly say that I have never felt so violated and furious. I then had to see who their provider was for South Africa, which turned out to be www.miranetworks.com and phoned them and my cellular provider to find out how to stop these goddam SMS's. Which of course I did - I had to send an SMS to some other number with CANCEL as the message. So they slip you in their database no problem, and make it quite a procedure to get off.

In short they are complete crooks. A dirty business model and I feel sorry for the millions around the world who have received all sorts of SMS spam as I've written this, while some sleezy people sit around a table boozing and laughing while the money from their disgusting company rolls in. It's a complete disgrace.

Some other links regarding the didgy conduct of sms.ac
A google groups post
Mobile tracker