"out of my mind!"

So I got my telephone bill today and normally it’s like $360HK a month.

It’s a one off payment for all data usage on my windows mobile phone. I thought I’d splash out and get myself an HTC HD2 because it looked super cool and I can now watch YouTube easily, anywhere I go.

More recently I started downloading apps for it, more specifically games. This is where it appears to have bitten me in the arse.

My bill was for $2124.34HK for the last month. I looked at the details of it and it shows that at a certain time, late one evening I had apparently made a 30 min phone call to Antarctica, which cost $1609.

I called SmarTone Vodaphone about this and she told me that they knew about a problem, whereby Windows phone users that had been infected with a virus had been making telephone calls to this number.  She also went on to tell me that it was specifically from a game that was downloaded called “3D Anti Terrorist”

which I did remember downloading and later removing because it didn’t work on my phone.  She then advised me that I would need to do a full, hard reset of the phone, meaning that all my data would be lost.  The more important question that she answered was that by the guidelines that are written by her company and she is forced to regurgitate, I would have to pay for this phone call.

This would have been downloaded from one of two places. Either from the “Windows Market Place” or more likely from “Freeware PocketPC”. The thing is I can’t seem to find it on these sites now and I don’t find any reference to it, apology for posting it, or anything to say that the application had a virus in it.

However, I did find this which fully helped to explain it.

So my questions are now.

• If smartone knew about this virus, what have they done about it?
• Have they approached the company that I downloaded it from (they undoubtedly have a record).
• Am I going to pay for this phone call?
• Does Freeware for Pocket PC or Windows marketplace have any antivirus software on it?

I am conducting my search now and waiting for the call from the managers at the telephone company.

*UPDATE*

So, as always, it’s a real effort to make sure you get to talk to the manager and when you do, things can start to happen with positive change.

The first thing to happen was that I was offered if I would pay half of the outstanding balance for this rougue telephone call. Which, of course, I flat refused. They explained that they (SmarTone) would have to pay the IDD company for the call and that I need to pay SmarTone. I explained it very simply, that they either don’t pay for the IDD call or take the IDD company to court and I will not pay for the call.

A few days later and I was told that they would pay for all of the cost of the telephone call and further more, the SmartTone service (from Hong Kong) would not allow calls to these premium rate IDD services anymore. So even if my phone did get the same virus again, it wouldn’t be able to dial the number to exploit the system again.

So all in all, it seem to appear that SmarTone have reacted to this situation rather well and left me happy enough for the time being to remain their customer.

Well done SmarTone.