does anybody have more info on this????
i did a little investigation and here is what i have determined. the company that the long code is tied to is broadtexter.com. they offer a free service to people who want to follow bands/comedians/acts/ etc. you basically join their fan club.
when i text help to the phone number it immediately autoresponds from that same number. that means they are either using an agg with a dedicated vmn (totally possible) of they are using a mobile modem with a sim (totally possible as well, and probably cheaper), but basically all they are doing from this phone number is pushing traffic to their website.
once you go to their website and sign up to a fan club; ALL FUTURE COMMUNICATION is mo/mt thru the SMTP gateway. dead giveaway is that they ask for your carrier when you sign up. second dead givaway is the caller id is [email protected] every time.
so the simple answer is that they are only using the vmn (long code) to drive people to their website to sign up...then all future communication is over SMTP. so the 160K+ messages are occuring thru the SMTP gateway. since they appear to be non-commercial (no ads, no spamming, etc.) and they are somewhat of a peer to peer setup, they probably fly under the radar (or are accepted by) the carriers.
if anyone can offer more insight to this, i would love to read it!