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Wireless Spam?

Posted by Cliff on from the the-roaches-of-the-internet dept.

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Recently I've begun to get spam on my e-mail equipped cellphone. Now, you have to realize I took every precaution to make sure this never happened: I have never used that e-mail address anywhere; I have an alias set up on my server that forwards to it; and I only use the alias for my own personal use. However, the spam I'm getting is not going through my server's alias to get to the phone -- I checked the logs. Multiple complaints to Voicestream's abuse address have not even evoked a response. The only way I can figure they got my address is either: Voicestream supplied it to the spammer; or the spammer entered all Voicestream phone numbers in e-mail format. Either way, I'm pissed at Voicestream. Also, I know for a fact I'm not the only Voicestream customer having this problem. The guys at work are getting the exact same spam at the exact same time. Is anyone else having this problem now? It's enough to make me drop my e-mail address on my phone. Could you imagine deleting 80 spams a day from your cellphone?"

3 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. [PhoneNumber]@telcoISP.com == spam by Kris_J · · Score: 3, Informative
    If you're using any service that includes a "free/bonus" email address of your mobile phone number @ someserver.com then you're lucky you haven't been spammed before. Same problem with ICQ email. Base ten, no letters, doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to auto-generate a couple of million probably-valid addresses.

    You can only safely forward email to a mobile phone if your service never uses the temping #@telco.com format, even "internally". My ISP is also my mobile phone provider and they go directly from my private email address to their SMS server without an extra email-2-SMS gateway. A private address I have masked by sneakemail and filtered by spamcop. (I can also cap the number of SMSes sent per 24 hours.)

  2. Charges have always been only on outbound calls by hackwrench · · Score: 3, Informative

    on long distance calls in the U.S. on regular phones. On cellular phones they have been paying both ways, but increasingly on cell phones long distance and local are treated the same. They have recently been offering free long distance for a monthly fee on regular phones.

  3. Data Spam and DOS Attacks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I recently had a similar problem which resulted in a DOS attack against my 7110. I recieved a data call every 1 minute from and 'unknown number'. Obviously a modem configured to phone my number over and over again. This resulted in calls being lost and my phone ringing itself to death.

    When I contacted my provider they said and I quote! "there is nothing we can do. They will stop when they realise their mistake!", Oh yeh - what if this is somebody determined to annoy me or even somebodies home PC thats been hacked.

    When are the mobile and phone providers going to realise that what happens on the Internet today will happen on the mobile network tomorrow...

    Almost as funny as the time my providers, support engineer told me to disable my "fir wall" so the alerts I was getting from Code Red infected machines will stop being displayed...

    regards -Sliver-