SMS-passwords have long been entered into our lives as a relatively convenient ( especially when compared with sending documents by the Post of Russia ) a method of remote identity verification. This method is certainly not ideal, since the success of the SMS delivery process depends on the correctness of the interaction of several actors. As a rule, it is: the sender - the cellular operator of the recipient - the recipient. Therefore, on the Internet you can find 1000 and 1 answer to the question "Why do not come SMS". But, I bet that with such an original reason as the one that I am going to tell you now, you have not yet come across ...



Somehow it happened that my desire to share useful information resulted in an entire essay, so if you don’t really like descriptions of other people's mental anguish, you can safely skip them by going directly to the denouement .

Prelude

To begin with, for several years now I have been doing research on the domain name market. During this time, I devoted a couple of master's theses and a number of publications in scientific journals to his various problems. At the same time, I strive to be different from the ordinary "researchers" who publish, in the absence of their own experience, free retellings of other people's works. Therefore, I often conduct my own experiments and, therefore, I am a client of a number of web services that specialize in domain name registration.
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The offices of these services are located mainly in the capital, and I live and work in the glorious city of Rostov-on-Don. Accordingly, every time when within the framework of any “experiment” I needed to transfer the rights to a domain name to another person, I had to think of how to confirm my identity with a minimum of financial and time costs, without going to our capital city.

Here it must be said that there is some kind of cartel agreement with Rostov notaries. They all claimed that they could not certify the authenticity of my signature under the text I typed on A4 paper ( although their prices contained such a service, costing 100 rubles ), but they were simply obliged to issue this text on stamped paper for 1000+ rubles. And how much you don’t bother them, that Moscow companies only need to certify the signature under the text formula established by them, and documents on the stamped paper, on the contrary, are more difficult for them to process within their business processes, this will not bring results.

When I complained about this situation to the employees of Moscow companies, they argued that no such problem was observed in the capital and notaries in the capital assured the signature of the text they offered as a standard instruction for transferring rights to a domain name.

In addition to the visit to the notary, it was necessary to figure out how to send the document to the metropolitan office. If time allowed, it was a relatively cheap lottery with our favorite mail. At that time, as in a short time, we had to use more reliable, but, accordingly, more expensive, services of delivery services.

A few years later, major services entered into agreements with web studios in a number of major cities ( including Rostov ) and delegated to them the authority to accept instructions for the transfer of domain names. In terms of cost, this service for web studios differed little from notarization, but it allowed to solve the problem of sending documents to Moscow. The Moscow office began processing the application immediately upon receipt of the scan from its Rostov partner, which made my life easier for a while.

In general, now you are about to imagine how happy I was when services began to provide an opportunity for paperless confirmation of transactions across domains and the procedure for confirming my identity became virtually instantaneous and free.

To confirm transactions via SMS authorization, it was required to enter into a special agreement in which the number was recorded to which notifications would be delivered and mutual obligations of the parties were prescribed. I concluded such an agreement in 2015 with the service that more often than others delighted me with its price policy.

Climax

As you probably already guessed, one day, after requesting an SMS password, I did not receive it. When the repeated attempt did not bring the expected result, I decided to check if the SMS delivery is blocking any application on the smartphone. Sticking a SIM card into a regular “dialer” I requested a new confirmation code, but a miracle did not happen.

Thinking, I went to my personal account on the site of my mobile operator and ordered a selection of transactions, starting from the day of the last notification from this service, which I found on the phone. After the last notification received, no transactions from the same sender were observed.

The next step was to contact the service support service. I was assured that they send all notifications regularly and even sent a log of all transactions since the last notification received. The log was certified by a seal from a third-party organization ( SMS provider ), from which the service acquired notification distribution services. As you can see, all notifications that I did not receive had “On the Way” status:



Then I began to look for similar situations in which users did not receive SMS-notifications only from a specific service ( since notifications from Ya.Money and Sber.Online were still received to me ). What alerted me, in all cases that I was able to detect, was my mobile operator ( for example: 1 , 2 ). I described the situation to a friend on the staff of my mobile operator and received the following comment from him:

I'm not sure that filtering is applied there. Perhaps we are talking about the fact that this so-called. A2P messages that inter-operator agreement. If there is no such direct contract between the service and the operator, or there is no agreement with the SMS aggregator, or the contract is terminated, the operator may not skip such messages. This is one of the options. To SMS somehow filtered - I do not have such data. But if there is a confirmation from the operator that the SMS has been sent to another operator, then you can track the loop. There should be a SMS sending transaction to the SMS Center.

I suppose it is more correct to make a technical application, attach the data of the outgoing operator about the SMS and request a solution from the operator. The operator will either confirm that he does not miss for some reason, or he will say that the SMS did not arrive. Then the only option is to search by loop.

I followed this advice and, a few days later, the technical support of my operator replied that none of the messages from the list I had attached came to their equipment, and therefore could not be blocked or rejected.

Thus, I found myself in a stalemate, when the sender assured that he regularly sends notifications, and my operator claimed that they did not come to him. Thinking that I was not losing anything, I forwarded the operator’s response to the service’s support with a request to check again whether there were any failures when sending notifications and then I received an unexpected answer ...

Decoupling

I admit, from such statements, I for some time fell into amazement, and it cost me a lot of effort not to tell the service staff that they were deeply wrong about the region. But, on reflection, I came to the conclusion that the current situation represents an excellent opportunity to gain personal experience in court proceedings. And the fact that I am for a certified lawyer is one who did not sue anyone?

So, what we have: a legal entity refuses to provide me a service on the basis that another legal entity, attracted by him as an executor, does not want to provide me any services, due to the fact that I previously reported to the FAS about cases of violations of the law about advertising , in which, as it turned out, this third party took part.

First of all, the provisions of Art. 426 of the Civil Code, in particular:

The refusal of a person engaged in an entrepreneurial or other income-generating activity to conclude a public contract in the presence of the opportunity to provide the consumer with relevant goods and services, to perform the relevant work for him is not allowed.

But then I remembered that I had that agreement, drawn up in 2015, in which the obligation of the service to send SMS passwords to the same number is spelled out in black and white. Of course, in the same agreement a number of exceptions were registered, including the presence of force majeure circumstances, but, in my opinion, the tyranny of the contractor for force majeure somehow did not draw.

Having been delighted that I have a legal basis to bring them to justice, I asked the support service of the mailing address for sending complaints. They reported the address, and after a while they said that they settled the issue with the SMS provider, the restrictions on my number were safely removed and I can again enjoy the benefits of civilization in the form of SMS authorization.

But, as you understand, the sediment remained! I spent a lot of time and nerve cells ( and not only my own, but also the employees of my mobile operator ), and I didn’t even apologize. But this is not the worst. It scares me that now I will never be sure that I will get access to my account in a timely manner. And not only on this service, but also on any other. My world will never be the same again.