English

Temporary restriction on sending SMS

Dear valued customer,

We hope this email finds you well.

After detecting a number of activities resembling a phishing campaign, we’ve temporarily disabled the SMS texting feature in certain countries, including the United States and Canada.

We understand that the SMS texting feature is essential for many of our customers, and we’d like to apologize for the inconvenience. We will proceed to restore the service and enhance overall security as soon as possible.

(Please see below for more information)

Issue History

• February 5th
  • We detected mass numbers of fraudulent SMS text being sent out to people overseas using our platform, while impersonating some of our customers. We’ve blocked the texting feature and are in the process of enhancing the security of our system.
• February 16th
  • Abnormal login detection and guidance feature based on the access region was released.
• February 18th
  • The SMS follow-up notification feature used for chat conversations was unblocked after the security update.
• Current Status (as of March 23rd)
  • In order to complete the investigation and security updates by the SMS provider, the texting feature including the follow-up notification has been temporarily disabled in certain countries.

Upcoming Plan

• The follow-up notification will return as soon as the updates are completed.
• In the near future, a quota system will be released, limiting the number of SMS texts based on usage patterns for each customer, as a security policy to minimize inconvenience for actual customers. From this point, the marketing message by SMS will be fully available.
• You may check the service status updates here → https://status.channel.io/

<aside> 📌 Please note that :

• Text messages in South Korea work as usual.
• You will not be charged for the undelivered SMS if you attempted to send SMS messages after the block(2/5). </aside>

Although Channel.io detected the fraudulent activities, we were unable to clearly inform you in advance about the limitations of our features, while updating our security. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.