Features of national SMS authorization

    SMS passwords have long been included in our lives as a relatively convenient ( especially when compared with sending documents by Russian Post ) remote authentication method. This method, of course, is not ideal, since the success of the SMS delivery process depends on the correctness of the interaction of several actors. As a rule, these are: the sender - the cellular operator of the receiver - the receiver. Therefore, on the pages of the Internet you can find 1000 and 1 answer to the question "Why SMS do not come." But I bet you haven’t yet encountered such an original reason as the one that I’m about to tell you now ...

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    It somehow happened that my desire to share useful information turned into a whole essay, so if you don’t really like the descriptions of other people's torment, you can safely skip them by going directly to the denouement .

    Prelude


    To begin with, for several years now I have been researching the domain name market. During this time, I devoted a couple of master's dissertations and a number of publications in scientific journals to his various problems. At the same time, I strive to be different from ordinary "researchers" publishing, for lack of my own experience, free retelling of other people's works. Therefore, I often conduct my own experiments and, in connection with this, I am a client of a number of web services specializing in domain name registration.

    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, as part of an “experiment”, I needed to transfer the domain name to another person, I needed to come up with a minimum of financial and time costs to prove my identity, without a trip to our capital city.

    It must be said here that Rostov notaries have some kind of cartel conspiracy. They all claimed as one that they could not assure the authenticity of my signature on the text I typed on sheet A4 ( although such a service, costing 100 rubles, was present in their price lists), but they are simply obliged to draw up this text on stamped paper for 1000+ rubles. And how much you can’t tell them that Moscow companies only require to assure the signature of the text formula they have established, and documents on stamped paper, on the contrary, are more difficult to process within their business processes, it will not bring any result.

    When I complained about this situation to the employees of Moscow companies, they claimed that there was no such problem in the capital and that the Moscow notaries perfectly assured the signature on the text that they proposed as a standard assignment for transferring rights to a domain name.

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

    A few years later, major services entered into agreements with web studios in a number of large cities ( including Rostov ) and delegated to them the authority to receive orders for the transfer of domain names. In cost, this service at web studios did not differ much from notarization, but it allowed to solve the problem of sending documents to Moscow. The Moscow office began to process the application immediately upon receipt of the scan from its Rostov partner, which made my life easier for some time.

    In general, now you can roughly imagine how happy I was when the services began to provide the possibility of paperless confirmation of transactions on domains and the procedure for confirming my identity became virtually instant and free.

    To confirm transactions through SMS authorization, it was necessary to conclude a special agreement in which the number was fixed to which notifications would be delivered and mutual obligations of the parties were recorded. I concluded such an agreement in 2015 with the service, which pleased me more often than others with its pricing policy.

    Climax


    As you probably already guessed, one fine day, having requested an SMS password, I did not receive it. When the second attempt did not bring the expected result, I decided to check if SMS delivery was blocking any application on the smartphone. Having stuck the SIM-card into the usual “dialer” I requested a new confirmation code, but the miracle did not happen.

    After thinking, I went into my personal account on the website of my mobile operator and ordered a selection of operations, starting from the day of the last notification from this service that 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 support service. They assured me that they sent all notifications correctly and even sent a log of all transactions since the last notification received. The log was certified by the seal of a third-party organization ( SMS provider ), from which the service purchased notification mailing services. As you can see, all the notifications that I didn’t receive had “On the go” status:

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    Then I started looking for similar situations in which users didn’t receive SMS notifications from just a specific service ( since notifications were from Y. Money and Sber .Online I still received ). What alerted me, in all cases that I was able to detect, my mobile operator appeared ( for example: 1 ,2 ). I described the situation to a friend in the state of my mobile operator and received the following comment from him:
    I'm not sure if filtering is applied there. Perhaps we are talking about the fact that this is the so-called A2P messages for which an inter-operator agreement is concluded. 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 has expired, then the operator may not skip such messages. This is one of the options. So that SMS is somehow filtered - I do not have such data. But if there is confirmation from the operator that the SMS was sent to another operator, then you can track the loop. There must be a transaction for sending SMS to SMS Center.

    I believe that it is best to make a technical request, attach the data of the outgoing operator about SMS and request solutions from the operator. The operator will either confirm that it is not skipping for some reason, or say that SMS did not come. Then only the option to search for a loop.

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

    Thus, I found myself in a stalemate when the sender assured me that he was sending notifications correctly, and my operator claimed that they did not come to him. Thinking that I was not losing anything, I sent the operator’s response to the support service of the service asking me to check again if there were any failures when sending notifications, and then I received an unexpected response ...

    Denouement


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    I confess, I'm from such statements for a time fell into ah surprise and it cost me a lot of effort not to declare employees to the service that they are in the land of ooh deeply wrong. But, on reflection, I came to the conclusion that the current situation is an excellent opportunity to gain experience of personal participation in the trial. And what am I for a certified lawyer who has never sued anyone?

    So, what do we have: a legal entity refuses to render services to me on the basis that another legal entity engaged by it as an executor does not want to provide me with any services, since I previously reported cases of violations of the law to the FAS about advertising in which, as it turned out, this third party participated.

    First of all, the provisions of Art. 426 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, in particular:
    The refusal of a person carrying out entrepreneurial or other income-generating activities to conclude a public contract, if it is possible to provide the consumer with the relevant goods, services, perform appropriate work for him, is not allowed.
    But then I remembered that I had the same agreement, drawn up in 2015, in which the obligation of the service to send SMS passwords to the same number was written in black and white. Of course, a number of exceptions were also spelled out in the same agreement, including the presence of force majeure circumstances, but, in my opinion, the tyranny of the contractor for force majeure somehow did not draw.

    Rejoicing that I had legal grounds to hold them accountable, I asked the service support service for the mailing address for sending complaints. They reported the address, and after some time they reported that they settled the issue with the SMS provider, the restrictions on my number were removed successfully and I can again enjoy the benefits of civilization in the form of SMS authorization.

    But, as you know, the sediment remained! I spent a lot of time and nerve cells ( and not only mine, but also the employees of my mobile operator ), and they did not even apologize to me. But this is not the worst. What scares me is 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 some other. My world will never be the same again.

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