THE HULME TUNE

I’ve just had a couple of text messages to my ‘3′ mobile phone saying:

FreeMsg: We have you listed as a In-active user, Please text ‘Live’ back to us on ‘81456‘ or your service will be suspended.

Notice the poor English “.. a In-active..” and “… user, Please..” a capital letter after a comma. In the from bar, they put your service provider like ‘3′. And because this is in your contacts as default, it’s easy to presume it’s from your mobile phone service provider. IT IS NOT.

Replying to this text will cost £3.50 each text, it is a premium rate text service. They will send a second message:

You are now Live! details have been forwarded to your email account, thankyou once again. Full T & C apply, please see your email for detials.

Again, very poor English grammar and poor spelling.

Then they send you another like the first saying that the user,

..must respond only to ‘81456‘ with the text ‘Live’ failure to do so..

So, in effect you are sending a second premium rate text to 81456. Now they have charged £7.00 to your mobile phone account bill.

If you have been a victim of this scam, you need to contact your phone’s service provider immediately. If you do get one then ask your provider for advice.

- by Paul Summer

Sounds great! You buy the mag and help the poor at the same time; keep the mag and sell it later for more than 50 times its value. Mind you.. I’m no expert, but I have watched a few daytime TV shows.

Last week’s “The Big Issue In The North” magazine could be worth something in a few years time. Why? Not because Daniel Day-Lewis is on the cover, it’s just that there’s a spelling mistake on the front cover.

In this day and age of computerised spell-checkers, it’s hard to find spelling mistakes, but to find one on the front cover of any magazine has to be one-in-a-billion. It is very very rare, in any day and age.

The word ‘homeless’ shows on last week’s front cover as ‘Homless’. This is why I think it would be worth something in the future.

An organisation as big as THE BIG ISSUE IN THE NORTH would squirm at the very thought of misspelling ‘homeless’ on any page, let alone their front cover, as the magazine itself is designed to help these very people.

But I don’t want to focus on this. Instead, I want to put to you the idea of keeping hold of last week’s copy dated 18-24 February, 2008. So you can make a bob or two in a few years to come.

Must be rare - surely?