I received a text message the other day from a friend of mine, which sounded like phone spam, but I'm not positive, hence I searched the internet hoping to find some definitive reference like you can for some e-mail virus hoax messages (i.e. Urban Legends), but didn't find much of anything.

The message is as follows:
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A 6yr old girl needs a heart transplant the phone companies have agreed 2 donate 5cents every time this msg is fwd. (not a joke)
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This sounds fishy to me for 2 reasons:
1. How would a cell phone company track the content of text messages to even be able to send 5 cents unless it scanned every single outgoing text message.


This would be a lot of work on the part of the cell phone company. Though, e-mail providers do this for tracking spam by using key attributes of a message (like the subject, whether it contains images, etc...).


2. Is it realistic to think that all the phone companies would synchronize in an effort to help a single person? I mean it sounds great, but not very realistic. I didn't even know phone companies did charity through text messaging until I read about the Virgin Mobil story. Though at least then you send a text message to a specific number, and hence that's easily trackable.

In the 6yr old case though you send it to whomever, using whatever arbitrary cell phone provider.

Hence I was wondering if phone companies would/have ever had this kind of collaborative effort for charity, and/or if they even do do this amount of text message content examination to be able to something like this or if they can just flag a message somehow with some special flag not accessible to normal users.

Thank you to anyone who has any information on this.

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