Please stay tuned to the end of the episode to hear a trailer from our friends

Melissa and Mandy at the podcast Moms and Murder, a true crime show featuring two

friends with original discussions on theories and controversies surrounding criminal cases.

It's on our must listen to list and we're sure y'all will enjoy moms and murder as well.

Now on to the show.

The Gone Cold Podcast may contain violent or graphic subject matter.

Listener discretion is advised. Oh, In September of 2005, New Zealand-based mobile phone service provider, plus SMS, held its first and Plus SMS had a big idea to revolutionize the way globally branded products advertised.

The details are quite mundane to the layperson, but to advertising executives and shareholders, the text messaging-based

promotional tool was exciting.

A way for these brands to reach potential consumers worldwide with the simplicity of a text,

securing specific numbers that coincided with a company's actual name on a phone's keypad.

An example would be this podcast securing the number

1-800 466 3265 or 1-800 gone cold, though there'd be an extra three tagged on in our case.

It might not have seemed like a huge deal to most.

The practice of assigning a word to a phone number had been around since the 1960s,

but to secure specific numbers on a provider's network was a big idea to guide them to Plus SMS, the company figured.

And it would provide global product giants with the ability to use those digits,

essentially their name in number form, for promotional texting.

Like those ads you see telling you to text 817 to 5555, plus SMS of course, would be paid for each of these texts.

The company had only started a year before by a man named Gary Donahue, and by the November following the shareholders meeting a month later the market value of plus SMS had risen to over 250 million dollars after Donahue's announcement that he had secured hundreds upon hundreds

of these numbers for use by global brands.

A year later, though, it turned out that he had not secured nearly the amount of numbers he'd claimed, and the company began spiraling downward.

...