"Terminating" sms-spam

Nowadays, one of the most popular and convenient ways to pay for mobile services and the Internet is the payment terminals that surround us everywhere. A typical model of using a terminal implies a simple sequence of actions in the form of choosing a payment point for a service and its operator, entering a personal account number, depositing money and confirming the payment itself. Modern, reasonable and, most importantly, fast. It is on this that their owners play, collecting mobile phone numbers for their legalized spam databases.


Consider the most popular, in my opinion, QIWI terminals. The payment process is as follows:

After carrying out these simple actions, the message on successful payment comes. It comes not for the sake of notifying the user of successful payment, as a rule, the operator himself does, but for the second advertising part of the message. And what is the saddest thing, advertising is not limited to this. After some time, once a month, similar, but already fully advertising messages come to the number with, to put it mildly, “low-quality” advertising about loans and loans, which have their own big pitfalls, but this is another story:



Let's return to the payment process. In those photos, unfortunately, nowhere does not speak about my consent to receive advertising messages, nor about the tricky offer agreement, in which lies the whole point, and you can read it only by clicking on the “information” button, which is inconspicuous in the background, or web site (the same “additional information about the payment” in the last photo, which is mentioned upon payment).

The contract itself consists of two offers and is available under this (1) and this (2) link. Remarkably, the first offer was found on a third-party site and is slightly different from the one found in the terminal interface itself. You can download the photos of the offer from the terminal from here .

And although I do not have a legal education, such a scheme does not seem to me quite honest. At the very beginning, I mentioned a typical model of using this “shaitan-box”, now try adding a mandatory reading of this agreement to it, something like installing almost any program. Agree, it looks a little ridiculous, especially if there is a queue behind the terminal?

Moreover, according to clause 5.3, they can transfer your “personal data” to certain “third parties” with impunity, and only God knows what they will do with your phone number. The payment operator most likely cannot connect the first and last name with the telephone number (unless the cellular operator does not provide this information to them) and there are no webcams in the terminals yet, but it’s still very unpleasant that my number is used for promotional purposes without due notice , and one way or another "process".

And the most important thing: you can only unsubscribe from this spam by phone: 8-800-333-00-59, +7 495 626-52-52 or, according to unofficial information, write to help@qiwi.ru.
Be alert and use alternative payment methods!