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Spammers Hit Wireless Phones
Fishstick writes, "This article at the Washington Post tells about the new spammer's frontier: wireless short messaging. Apparently, the e-mail address of certain wireless service provider's subscribers can be easily derived from the phone number, making life easy for the spammer who wants to "reach out and touch someone" with their special gift of canned luncheon meat. " My spam e-mail is now about 25% of my e-mail. Thank God for filters (they also work nicely on boring press releases ;)
I got an E-Mail from a spammer the other day, and you know what they were advertising? They were selling E-Mail addresses. They boasted somewhere around 500,000 "VALID E-MAIL ADDRESSES!"
Now, you can be *anywhere*, and get a chirp -- SPAM CALLING. It's infuriating. Thank goodness I don't have a cell phone - I despise them....but I can feel for those who will be affected by this crap. (What gets me, is that almost everyone who can do anything about spam is so blasé about it. They just don't care.)
On an unrelated-yet-related side note, what do ISPs actually DO about reported spam? I've noticed that 85-90% of my Spam can be traced back to either PSI.NET or UU.NET. Of course, I forward the mail to ABUSE@xxx.yyy, and they send me the standard "We've recieved your complaint, blah blah blah" and "We have taken action against those responsible, blah blah blah", but it just KEEPS COMING IN from those addresses. Not everyone on those services is a Spammer, so I can assume 2 things:
If they terminate the spammer's account, they have no problem giving the spammer another one.
OR
They really *aren't* taking any action whatsoever.
In either case, I can only guess that these services (as are any others that do the same thing) are Spammer-Friendly. That makes me Sick.
Oh, I've also noticed that AOL has changed their abuse structure. Just for your information, AOL no longer accepts Spam complaints at abuse@aol.com. The NEW address to send SPAM complaints to is: tosemail1@aol.com.
(AOL never gets back to me. They must hate acknowledging that something is WRONG in their perfect service.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
because this will get spam laws accepted, challenged, and cemented a LOT faster than the current process. Why? cell phone access is metered, battery-limited, and often business-critical. "Sorry, I didn't get your voicemail about the system being down because all the spam ran my battery down". Right. That'd go over like a ton of bricks--and get the spammers sued for liability and lost earnings.
We should make sure that the laws that come out of this (and there WILL be laws, just as there WILL be cell-spam now that it's possible) also cover other forms of spam, including email and direct-mail.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Email addresses are irrelevant, unless the spammers are stupid enough to give you a valid reply address (like "write to sales@idiot.com for a catalog!"). The name of the game in spam-busting is the Received: headers.
Track the spam back to the SMTP server it was sent from. Do a WHOIS on that domain. Email the listed sysadmin, as well as abuse@that_domain.com and explain how open relays are just like letting spammers steal their money. Also:
Do I take spam-busting too seriously? Hell yes. But I've inflicted a lot of damage on dozens of spammers, and gotten a few dozen open relays shut. Every little bit helps.
The point is: snail junkmailers pay for their junk. Spammers make others pay for their junk. And the fact that emails are so much cheaper just means that if spammers were not being fought, we'd quickly end up with 99% of all email traffic being spam, effectively destroying emails as a medium of communication.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
The people that got these messages may be in luck, to the tune of $500 USD. The TCPA bans automated calling of cell phones . It certainly seems as if this falls under this umbrella. I would certainly like to see this prosecuted.