webofevil | Text "Tot"

I’m hardly the first person to talk about this, although I appear to be the first person to put the damn thing on Youtube. It’s the Tot Name and Future Husband Initial ad, a hilariously transparent money trap that leaves me deeply conflicted. On one hand, it’s twisted and wrong to snare the credulous and unwary; on the other, if you actively sign up to have someone text you a single letter of the alphabet every week at £1.50 a go, you are honestly too dumb to be owning a phone in the first place. What else do you do with it? Use it as a washing-up brush?

The “service” is provided by Red Circle Technologies, which also runs TV ads for games for mobile phones and “sexy babe videos” of “girls in your area”. All of these are subscription services that for some reason are extremely difficult to terminate. Go googling and you will find sundry plaintive posts on messageboards saying, “My 13 year-old keeps getting his credit taken by these people; I’ve tried to contact them but they won’t reply”, although no adults appear to be owning up to getting caught out by the £8 signup fee and the endless billing thereafter. This must be because they’re far too sensible for that to have happened to them. That’ll be it.

This service has inspired me to set up one of my own. For all our sakes, I’ll skip the whole tedious process of setting up a company, with all the costs and administrative kerfuffle that involves. Just send me £20 (card or Paypal; personal cheques no longer accepted) and I will guarantee to write down a digit on a Post-It and send it to you every week for as long as I remember. Watch your collection of numbers grow week by week. Perhaps you’ll be able to figure out what the lucky number is. Intense demand is expected for these limited-edition exclusives, so order now. Number is not guaranteed to mean anything. Your statutory rights are severely affected. To unsubscribe from this service text “AAARGH” to, I don’t know, Nicky Campbell or something.