Thinking Of Putting A Sim Card In A Cache

[+Matrix]

I am in the process of setting my first cache and thought about putting a payg sim card in it so people can put it in heir phones and text a number if they want when they find it.

 

Does anybody think it would be used or am I wasting my time ?

[+HooloovooUK]

I am in the process of setting my first cache and thought about putting a payg sim card in it so people can put it in heir phones and text a number if they want when they find it.

 

Does anybody think it would be used or am I wasting my time ?

 

To be honest if there was a request to text a number when I found the cache I would probably just do it from my phone and pay the 10p or whatever myself rather than go to the hassle of swapping sims.

 

Plus you'll have the problem that some phones are networked locked so your sim may not work in every cachers phone.

 

One thing you could do if you do go the sim card route though is you could send the cache a message, which would be queued up to arrive as soon as someone inserted the card and switched their phone on. That would be pretty cool.

Edited May 14, 2006 by HooloovooUK

[+Matrix]

One thing you could do if you do go the sim card route though is you could send the cache a message, which would be queued up to arrive as soon as someone inserted the card and switched their phone on. That would be pretty cool.

 

Now thats a cool Idea something like congratulations on finding it plus with delivery reports I would know the cache had been found

 

I agree about the sim lock but I thought it may be worth a go

[+Bear and Ragged]

 

No thanks. I'm not putting an unknown, untrusted sim card in my phone!

Never know what any other finder has done to the card!

(It's not that I don't trust fellow cachers, but others have been known to find a cache!)

 

G

Edited May 14, 2006 by KandG

[+Matrix]

 

No thanks. I'm not putting an unknown, untrusted sim card in my phone!

Never know what any other finder has done to the card!

(It's not that I don't trust fellow cachers, but others have been known to find a cache!)

 

G

 

True you cannot be to careful after all if somebody had done something silly with the sim the networks would know who through the imei of the phone and they would be knocking at my door as the registered owner of the sim

[+Brenin Tegeingl]

How about in part one you put a phone no and email address which to either the finder sends a phone No, you then text back the coordinates for the next stage. As long as you make it abundantly clear that finding the cache will involve 2 visits there should be no complaints. For those who are worried about the cache being got at, make the email option contact through your profile with the phone no in the cache as confirmation of a find of part one. As this is not the loggable container it should not fall foul of the No code word to log a find rule.

 

Dave

[+sTeamTraen]

No thanks. I'm not putting an unknown, untrusted sim card in my phone!

Never know what any other finder has done to the card!

 

Ummm... what can you "do" to a SIM card? AFAIK it doesn't contain any (modifiable) software, so it's no more dangerous for your phone, than putting a diskette in your PC's drive and listing the directory. SIMs are designed to be very, very tamper-proof - and if they weren't, you'd be hearing a lot of stories about cloning.

 

I think the OP's idea is great, with two problems:

- The "phone locked to network" issue - I suppose you could put 4 SIMs in there...

- The elementary problem of the SIM getting nicked if it has any credit on it at all.

[alistair_uk]

The biggest problem is that phones are locked to a particular network. Personally I would not change the SIM on my phone either as on this and my last phone changing the SIM reset many of the phones settings (ARRGGGHHHHH!!!!). Sorry, I will chill for a second....

 

...okay I am chilled and will not think about the haste of mobiles for the rest of this post. I agree that many would rather just use there own phone, but as someone who does not get a lot of this texting lark I do have to question why we would want to.

 

Sorry if that sounded a little negative, it was not supposed to at all. Normally I love looking for interesting things to do like this.

[Dave from Glanton]

One thing you could do if you do go the sim card route though is you could send the cache a message, which would be queued up to arrive as soon as someone inserted the card and switched their phone on. That would be pretty cool.

 

I don't think that'd work - a message only has a certain lifespan, and if it doesn't reach the target phone within a time limit determined by the network operator (say 48 hours) then it just vanishes into the ether.

[+Bear and Ragged]

SIMs are designed to be very, very tamper-proof - and if they weren't, you'd be hearing a lot of stories about cloning.

 

Chip and Pin was supposed to be the securest thing for credit/debit cards...

£1m chip and pin fraud

[+sTeamTraen]

Chip and Pin was supposed to be the securest thing for credit/debit cards...

£1m chip and pin fraud

 

I don't think that's relevant to this discussion... nobody is suggesting that anybody has been altering the chips on the cards, or cloning them.

 

There are plenty of ways to defeat any security system if you allow somebody to hold your card. We're talking here about exactly the opposite situation: someone provides you with a chip. (Just like your bank does... do you trust all the staff at your local bank? No, neither do I, but then neither does the bank, so they design their systems around that. My guess is that Shell forgot that bit.)

 

Chip and pin has been mandatory on every single card transaction in France for over ten years now and there has not been a single reported case of card cloning or alteration. That's not to say it can't be done, but after about ten billion transactions, it's clearly a lot harder than the alternatives. And the stakes are pretty high, so you can bet some people are trying very hard to do it.

[SandyGarrity]

Personally, I would not pop a sim card into my phone.