Sony Mobile Keeps Loosing Top Up Money

[Richb2004v2]

My wife is having trouble with her Sony mobile phone. She is on a 1-2-call pay as you go contract. In the last day or so she has put two lots of 100 baht on it only to have it dissappear almost straight away. She called 1-2-call today and they suggest that she has a virus on the phone and that she should take it in to one of their shops. I know nothing about mobile phones but I wonder where she could have got a virus from. The operator asked her if she uses the internet on the phone which she does not. So where can it have come from? Has anyone any other ideas what could be the problem?

[manjara]

My wife is having trouble with her Sony mobile phone. She is on a 1-2-call pay as you go contract. In the last day or so she has put two lots of 100 baht on it only to have it dissappear almost straight away. She called 1-2-call today and they suggest that she has a virus on the phone and that she should take it in to one of their shops. I know nothing about mobile phones but I wonder where she could have got a virus from. The operator asked her if she uses the internet on the phone which she does not. So where can it have come from? Has anyone any other ideas what could be the problem?

1-2-Call should be able to tell you what the money is being used on. If it is on GPRS (internet) then I suggest you get them to tell you how to deactivate the GPRS on your phone (asuming you don't need it for anything!). They should be able to do it from their end too!

The phone will still be able to do voice calls.

It is possible for the phone to have a 'virus', if she has run an application sent to it, e.g. as an MMS (Multimedia message).

The main thing to know, when dealing with the customer care people, is that they have a record of all chargeable activities made from the phone, it is not possible for the virus to 'eat' the money, only to use the balance to make calls or use the internet.

As it's prepay and AIS, I suspect they have little information on what the phone is doing, but they can at least tell you what activity is using the balance.

[Crushdepth]

My wife is having trouble with her Sony mobile phone.

Is it a smartphone? If so then there are a number of viruses out there affecting Symbian based phones, although mostly they try to spread by bluetooth, I haven't heard of one that can make a call or open an internet connection. But if her phone *isn't* a smartphone then it is very unlikely that a virus is involved. More likely the phone company has screwed up and is trying to assign elsewhere.