I am pretty good at avoiding scams and spam.

I set up a spam filter on my e-mails and nearly all the crap gets filtered out. The stupid telephone calls of “your e-mail is compromised”, “you owe income tax” etc just get ignored. No, I wasn’t mis-sold PPI, thanks.

But I got one the other day that could not have been avoided:

On my cellphone/mobile I got a message offering some kind of promotion. I ignored it, just deleted it and thought no more about it.

Until I looked at my bill, and saw it had cost me £4. For an SMS message I didn’t want, hadn’t asked for. And, it appeared, there was nothing I could do.