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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?"

4 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. In Japan... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is an epidemic in Japan with regards to cell phones. Cell phone usage is only charged to outbound calls, providing an incentive not to call anyone (but I digress...)

    There is a problem wherein spammers (for lack of a better word) are calling cell phones at random and hanging up immediately. This results in a "Missed Call" type of message with an included phone number. Phone owners are thusly tricked into calling the number back and subsequently charged outrageous fees for calling a 900-style number.

    It's a big problem over here. When I got my phone, I had 3 calls like that in the first day.

  2. The Simple Explanation... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    your ISP is selling out just like others.

  3. Sprint wireless spam by The+Karma+Whore+Guy · · Score: 1, Interesting

    As of this morning SprintPCS still officially refuses to handle their already existent SMS spam problem. They will not pass headers to end users. They provide only message 'from' and 'subject' headers, which does little good. Of course we all know how easily forged envelope headers are, so it matters little. Their SMS gateway still strips the relay IP information, and their web to SMS gateway doesn't pass an IP from the sender to the recipient either.

    In short Sprint is forcing themselves to be the only ascertainable point of contact for the end user. Their official suggestion? Change your phone number and the messages will stop. They do claim that they will try to identify the sender and ask them to stop, but with Sprints track record as a publicly identifiable smashups that is hard to belive.

  4. Snuff out spam by Kisai · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I do hope that the telcos realize that they are impairing adoption of wireless e-mail as long as two things still happen:

    1. Billing for messages recieved (when most of them are going to be spam)
    2. Not billing the e-mail sender.

    What needs to happen is that the telcos, maybe even the postal system needs to create an unique GUID-like system that generates e-mail addresses in the format like FFFFFFFF-FFFFFFFF-FFFFFFFF-FFFF
    Of which the last two bytes can be used for identification/area, kinda like area-codes, but not base-10.

    Then charge money for access to the directory service that resolves the GUID to something like mynameissombody@exchange.city.state.country.planet

    So in order for spammers to mass-gather and send spam it would cost a fortune. Bulk-mail to specific target groups is made easier as well, since someone could pay a few thousand dollars and lookup an entire cities worth of e-mails. Instead of the stupid "10 billion e-mails on CD for 449$" type of crap seen in spam, which is neither targeted, nor regionally correct (Canadians, Austrailians, and Europeans get so much spam for junk from the USA isn't not funny.)

    Then there is also a magic flag that we add called "disable bulk mail" and whenever a bulk query is called to the directory, e-mails with the flag set are not returned.

    Also allow for opting-out of reciving e-mail from entire countries, finally, get rid of all that american spam.

    Then opt-in your friends (the "only directly recieve e-mail from those on your list" feature.) so they can contact you directly.

    It could be done, but I doubt the telcos want to pony up the money to do it. They are in the market for making money, and making money means billing the reciever for all the spam they recieve.