Forward a scam message to 7726 not working

[TheBatsWhiskers]

I received a message from+44 7884 407258 on Christmas day informing me that EE was having issues verifying my billing details and of course I was instructed to click on a link <https://myee-onlinebilling.com> immediately to update my details. 

A scam/phishing message, but when I tried forwarding it to 7726 I get a "Not Delivered" indicator. 

Phone is an iPhone 7+ with iOS 14.2 installed.  ANy ideas?

[Christopher_G]

Hi @TheBatsWhiskers

Welcome to the community.

What happens when you copy and paste the link into a new message and send it to 7726?

Chris

[TheBatsWhiskers]

Hi @Christopher_G

Thankyou.

I tried copying and pasting into a new message the other day and have just tried again to be sure, but the same thing - a message send failure. 

Very strange.

Tim

[XRaySpeX]

Who is your mobile network provider? Maybe they don't subscribe to 7726.

[TheBatsWhiskers]

EE of course. 

The action I tried to take comes from their recommendations on what to do with scam/phishing emails, as in please forward to 7726.

[XRaySpeX]

Not necessarily! You could be a non-EE user receiving a spurious msg about your non-existent EE a/c, as others have done.

[TheBatsWhiskers]

Point taken, but as I do have an EE account I tried to follow their actions and it failed three times, hence my post. 

I will now email a copy of the message to EE's phishing address and also highlight the failures I have experienced when trying to use the 7726 number.

[TheBatsWhiskers]

Something of ajoke really as the message with a copy of the scam message I sent to EE's phishing email address has been rejected by EE's mail server.

[jonnny5alive]

Hi @Christopher_G

I have just reported two Royal Mail delivery scam text messages and initially I too got 'message sending failure' back from 7726 (I have stored 7726 in my contacts as' EE spam reporting').  My phone is a Galaxy S10 and was using the Microsoft SMS App as realised the stored number becomes +447726 when forwarding the spam text. When I forwarded it and manually entered 7726 it worked.  This problem does not seem to happen with Samsung messages or Google messages apps from what I can see.  Could +447726 be setup to be the same as 7726 by the EE network as this would overcome such problems?

Overall it was not clear to me how to go about reporting the span text messages even after reading the EE help page "forward a text message (including phone number or company name) to 7726 free of charge, so your mobile phone provider can investigate"

I thought I might have to put them in the same text message somehow?  However when I forwarded the spam text message, I got a nice reply text asking to send the original sender number in another message which I did. After this I got a further thank you text confirmation from 7726.

It would be really helpful if this process were better explained on the help page HOW TO AVOID AND PREVENT SCAMS INCLUDING PHISHING, VISHING AND SMISHING 

[James_B]

Hi @jonnny5alive,

Welcome to the EE Community. 🙂

Thanks for your feedback. I'm afraid text short codes don't use the international dialling code so it isn't possible to support texts starting with +44.

As you mentioned, most messaging apps won't add the international dialling code to a short code. Does the app you had an issue with have a feature called 'dialling assist' or similar? If it does, you can avoid this issue by turning it off.

Hope this helps.

James