Phone virus/weirdness/spam attack?

[Freddyfruitba...]

Last night I received a text from a friend (ie, somebody who#s number is in my contacts directory. It said "I've sent you a Photo/Video Message. Go to https://get.XXX.ee.co.uk/MVNO/ Your message is valid for 7 days" (I've substituted "XXX" for "mms" in this URL so as not to publish a possibly live dodgy link directly on the forum). A followup text provided a password to access the message.

I know i should have been more wary, but I assumed that the friend had meant to send me a picture via WhatsApp or something, had tried to send it by text and that this was the result - anyway, I tapped the link and went to a website where I had to enter my mobile number and the aforementioned password. When nothing happened I contacted the friend, who said she's not sent me anything. Shit.

I've never heard of anything like this before - what is likely to have happened here? My phone's an Phone 6 - is there any chance I could have picked up something nasty? Or maybe all I've done is confirm that my mobile number is active, and have opened the floodgates to nuisance calls?

Clearly my friend's number was spoofed on the incoming text, which highlights that somehow my own number has been linked to hers, so one of us clearly has been compromised for that to have happened.

Any thoughts please?
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KC100->CB100N->CB250RS--------->DL650AL2->R1200RS->R1250RS

[owl]

The link you provided links to EE's TLD which means that it should be safe. Are you sure that was the actual hyperlink or did the link just look like that address and actually take you somewhere else

E.g. www.google.com
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Observation is the greatest source of wisdom.

[bamt]

It's OK. MMS is a bit of kludged hack of a system. Basically, your friend has tried to send a photo to you, and for whatever reason (network issues, settings, wrong time of day, didn't rotate the phone counterclockwise three times whilst chewing on a bat's ear and providing the correct incantation from the mystical book of 3ggp) the network decided it couldn't deliver it to you as an MMS (which is actually just an SMS that instructs your phone to download the MMS automatically) and sent you a link to it instead.

The only problem is that they do look an awful lot like spam messages, especially as it is likely that you are actually using one of the MVNOs (mobile virtual network operators) that piggy back on ee, so you don't even recognise it as coming from your own network.

[Freddyfruitba...]

Thanks guys, very reassuring.

I've just entered the URL on my computer, and confirmed that Chrome definitely went to that link. I inserted my credentials and ended up on web 'inbox', just showing 44785296xxxx@mms.ee.co.uk (where 44785296xxxx is my friend's number) as the sender of a message received yesterday at 7.00 pm. There's no actual message there if I try to open it and as I mentioned before, the sender has nothing in her own sent box to indicate she texted me anything.

So dunno what's going on there. Are we still definitely happy there's nothing possibly nefarious going on?!
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KC100->CB100N->CB250RS--------->DL650AL2->R1200RS->R1250RS