Saturday, October 28, 2017

removing malware/adware from Intex phone - trois

Even after my earlier posts about removing malware from Intex phone, one issue persisted. Occasionally, Rs. 1.50 would be deducted as SMS charges. At first I thought it was some sort of location finding behaviour by some app - as I noted, this deduction was noticed after I installed Uber and PayTM apps. But even after uninstalling those apps, the issue remained - deduction of Rs. 1.50 once in a week or so.

Finally I contacted my carrier Airtel via email - which seems to be the only way to reach their customer service department. They advised that I could Dial *121*51# (Toll Free) or 12181 (Toll Free) to check last 5 deductions which have happened in the last 72 hours. Using this information, I found that the SMS charges were to a number 9582943043. Googling, found that this is an "activation feature" on Intex phones!

https://together.jolla.com/question/139190/intex-aqua-fish-re-activation-sms/

Now I seem to have removed the offending Intex services - using Kingroot and root uninstaller - searched for sms in system apps, found SmsRegister - com.android.smsregister - uninstalled it. This seems to have solved the issue - no sms sent for the last one month. 

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