A subtle but important Global Telecom SMS update was recently rolled out to testers who have access to the Zucoins Wallet.
In rare but some cases, we observed that telecom companies were modifying the contents of SMS messages when certain characters appeared in the SMS message.
The system already converts peer-to-peer transfer codes into formats designed to send over SMS networks safely, which made this occurrence odd.
However, some Telecom networks, or even just certain locations of a Telecom’s network, don’t follow established practices and protocols when sending and delivering an SMS message.
This is usually not malicious—just misconfiguration from technicians at telecom companies or old creaky communication gear that hasn’t been updated in over a decade.
Even common characters like dashes or underscores in SMS messages are sometimes replaced with other characters, depending on where the user is in the world and what telecom provider they’re using.
To make this problem trickier, this only happens when a user sends out an SMS—not when you’re typing in the message.
On the user’s end, everything looks fine. The receiver, however, might get a very similar message, with a few minor, but important pieces changed. Meaning the transfer becomes invalid, even though the sender sent the correct details from their end.
As the Zucoin Wallet sends real-time transactions to anyone, anywhere, this was concerning and something we had to get to the bottom of.
We rolled up our sleeves and dug into telecom GSM encoding standards worldwide.
Version 112 of the Zucoins app gets over a dozen extra changes on how we handle transfers via SMS messages.
This update uses all kinds of safe message checking and recovery techniques, attempting to reliably understand the original contents.
All of these changes are behind the scenes—there’s no change to how users see or use the Zucoins Wallet.
Improvements like this mean international transfers via SMS messages are now even more reliable, even with such telecom quirks outside of our control.
This update is available to all test users on Zucoins Wallet app version 112 and newer.
*Please note that the Zucoin Wallet is currently only available to our Test Groups and not the general public.
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