I need to clarify some technical details about a text message.
Few weeks ago I received a SMS and the sender denied that particular message was sent by her but sent some other message which had different content than the one I received, at the time compatible with the previous. Following this event sender has deleted the message which she claimed as sent. As I wanted to find how I received a different message, I tried to trace it, only possible way was to tally number of characters sent and received because to decode a text message a court order is mandatory.
The SMS I received had 365 characters including 292 letters, 58 spaces, 12 full stops and 3 exclamation marks. In this SMS, on my hand set [HTC Sensation XE], shows 6 characters as underlined(as a web address). I asked the sender's service provider to check the number of characters sent from their network and the answer was, 383 characters had been sent. Could you please explain how such thing can happen?
I assume sender's service provider uses GSM 7 bit Alphabet decoding system as they send 160 characters per message. Sender's hand set is Micromax Q55 Bling,
Quite often I'll see text underlined appearing as a hyperlink when the sender accidentally.puts.full.stops.between words (like that) The phone incorrectly identifies that as a URL.
With regards to the phantom message the cynic in me just thinks she's lying and she did send you the message as received 😉 then made up a story to cover the fact.
Depending on the make and model of the phone the deleted SMS may be recoverable from the senders phone to corroborate her story, but you will either need her permission or a court order to get hold of that phone.
Oh and then you will need access to a UFED or XRY to download the phone and try to recover the deleted SMS…..is this needed for legal proceedings or just for interest?
Adam, Thanks for your reply.
Yes that message shows some text as hyperlink(her.im), According to my understanding when a text message encode with GSM 7 bit Alphabet encoder, each character such as a letter,digit,space or symbol will be encoded by two digits or a digit with letter,
Eg ' Hello World ' is coded as ' 48656C6C6F20576F726C64 ', 'H' = 48, 'e' = 65
So, if the phone identified it as a hyperlink, can it show as an additional characters?
In that case, can 'her.im' be encoded as more than 6 characters ?
Sorry, GSM encoding is outside of the realms of my experience so I won't even offer a comment there )
I will offer a logical thought though, if the text 'her.im' was accidentally identified as a URL by the phones I would expect your message to have more characters not less than when it was sent…..just my thoughts but I don't really know how the encoding process works.
Thanks Adam,
Do you now some place or person that I can find an answer for this. I am a student at UWA currently.
From my experience (on one occasion only), it may be possible that she is telling the truth. Recently, I sent an SMS to my wife and received a puzzled response back from her. I reviewed the SMS on my phone and it was perfectly clear and said what I intended.
Naturally assuming she was wrong D, I checked her phone when I got home and the SMS she received was a combination of the SMS I sent and one I had sent to someone else months ago.
So, to recap, I sent a particular SMS and the recipient received a combination of that SMS and one sents months ago to a totally different recipient. Not sure how it happened and I have not had the time to image and analyze both phones (both 1st generation Samsung Galaxy S models).
I need to clarify some technical details about a text message.
Few weeks ago I received a SMS and the sender denied that particular message was sent by her but sent some other message which had different content than the one I received, at the time compatible with the previous. Following this event sender has deleted the message which she claimed as sent. As I wanted to find how I received a different message, I tried to trace it, only possible way was to tally number of characters sent and received because to decode a text message a court order is mandatory.
The SMS I received had 365 characters including 292 letters, 58 spaces, 12 full stops and 3 exclamation marks. In this SMS, on my hand set [HTC Sensation XE], shows 6 characters as underlined(as a web address). I asked the sender's service provider to check the number of characters sent from their network and the answer was, 383 characters had been sent. Could you please explain how such thing can happen?
I assume sender's service provider uses GSM 7 bit Alphabet decoding system as they send 160 characters per message. Sender's hand set is Micromax Q55 Bling,
So message is stored on handset not (U)SIM? In an SMS folder? With data encoding scheme (DCS) Unicode?
You say nothing about the E.164 identifier?
So, to recap, I sent a particular SMS and the recipient received a combination of that SMS and one sents months ago to a totally different recipient. Not sure how it happened and I have not had the time to image and analyze both phones (both 1st generation Samsung Galaxy S models).
Is this a case that an old text message was forwarded to the recipient with new text added at the beginning?