Mad mobile sends messages on its own, runs up 18-page bill

Odd story coming out of Tianjin, about 100 miles southeast of Beijing; some girl's mobile phone kept on switching off by itself. Immediately after switching the phone back on, the mobile started sending messages like there was no tomorrow. An attempt at ringing someone resulted in a warning:

You've run out of cash and owe us CNY 300 in unpaid bills!

That oddity happened with a Nokia 7370 in a Tianjin university. (At the last Mobile Monday in Beijing, we heard someone from Nokia swearing blindly that they were interested in "delivering the best user experience". Is this the "best user experience", Nokia?)

The whole SMS madness started when she preprogrammed the phone to automatically send dozens of New Year SMS text messages before dozing off at midnight.

The scary thing happened during her trip to Dreamland. Unbeknownst to her, the mobile phone started sending what must be 4,700 messages by itself before the battery went flat, finally ending the messaging madness. After plugging the recharger in, she was terrified to find the mobile phone still sending messages like crazy!

Totally confused, she headed to the next China Mobile service office, only to find out that 4,700+ messages were sent -- one every 4 to 5 seconds -- from midnight through to 6:32 AM. In particular, one number alone got hit a record 4,000 times. She got downright frightened after the bill was presented to her: this bill clocked in at no less than 18 full pages.

Even worse, she had to fix her phone (it had a bug in it) and pay CNY 300 just to get things back to normal. This all kind of makes us wonder: isn't this a bit unfair?...

Cross-posted from TechBlog86.com