Comms: UK SMS system heavily used for international fraud faling Nokia competition

The messages follow a simple pattern: from one UK number invite victims to call a different UK number or to e-mail to an address which fraudulently includes the word "nokia" but is at an anonymous e-mail service such as live.com.

Originator displayed as

+447507819636+447950809760+447806755379

Requests call back to+447045761218+447045750131

requests email touknokia22@live.co.uknokiaunit@hotmail.co.uknokclas@gmail.com

The scam refers to a fictitious promotion by Nokia UK suggesting that the phone numbers of victims have been obtained by the unlawful hacking of someone's electronic address book in the UK.

The numbers increase with each SMS - starting offering GBP350,000 and increasing via GBP500,000 to GBP900,000.

The 0704 area code is a non-geographical code. Calls to those numbers are charged at high premium rates. They are often unavailable from VoIP and overseas. The numbers can be redirected to any one of a large number of countries, making it impossible for victims to know where the call terminates.

Caveat: there has, for some time, been a buzz on internet bulletin boards suggesting that the mechanism exists to falsify outgoing SMS numbers. We have not been able to verify this but suspect that it may involve a web-based distribution service. If this is so, then the true owners of the outgoing numbers referred to above may be entirely innocent of any involvement and, perhaps, not even being aware that their number is being used. Indeed, the number may be changed for each outgoing message therefore reducing the chance that angry recipients will reply and draw attention to the abuse.