An acquaintance of mine recently got a message from a sender noted as Vmobile Pro. In the text message he was said to have won a Honda i-Vtec and was told to contact customer care for details.

He went and Vmovile insisted that they didn't send the message. What makes this strange is that the sender was addressed as Vmobile Pro (Vmobile promotions?) Vmobile are 'unable' to trace the number from which it came from on their network or identify any other network it could have come from.

Is this possible? Evidently they do have a promo going on at the moment and suddenly methinks it has to do with their integrity, because it originated from Vmobile and no other place. Is it possible to clone Vmobiles name and sender without the knowledge of the Vmobile network and systems setup?

Those who understand how phones work might want to advise me, because I have advised my friend to report the same to the NCC! The Honda is his and somebody had better come up and put up.

Well, it's a fake SMS. SMS Sender ID can easily be spoofed. How could your friend possibly expect to win a competition he didn't register for?

Just like Seun said, sender ids on SMS messages can be spoofed - it's just like email too: you can spoof the sender address of an email. There's one other way however, you can use to track the possible origin of the message. First you would have to log the time and date of the SMS and also something called the SMSC or SMS Center. This information can be found when you choose to view the details of the SMS (there should be some facility like this on most phones) This is like the server from where the SMS originated. Armed with those, you can take the investigations further.