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Beep! Beep! You have Broken the Law.

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-what-are-they-doing-with-the-organs dept.

medscaper writes "Authorities in China are using computers to spam mobile phones of law-breakers until they turn themselves in. Apparently, lots of illegal advertisements as stickers with mobile-phone numbers listed are placed around large cities and are becoming an eyesore. So, the authorities call the cell phones incessantly with recorded messages that demand the "businessmen" to turn themselves in."

7 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. I'm mad as hell, and I'm not gonna take it anymore by agentkhaki · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So basically, rather than taking the time to track these folks down, they're just going to annoy the culprits into submission...?

    At first, I was going to say "why not just turn the phone off?"

    But phone being off -> no incoming business calls either. Turn the phone on -> be spammed by police and have your minutes wasted. Turn yourself in -> no more spam + you getting a fine + you no longer hanging stickers.

    But couldn't you just block whatever number the cops are calling from?

    --
    Ack!
  2. Re:Hmm... by thynk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    How well does this actually work? Wouldn't they just get a new phone number?

    From the article

    Those who prefer to change their "poisoned" number rather than face punishment incur the fees and inconvenience of switching, and also lose any business their ad might have generated.

    So changing the number comes with a pretty high price. Course, I'm "sure" after they get this message, every one goes right in and turns them selves in. I wonder how long it will take before someone figures out how to bypass this.

    --

    Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.
  3. Law Enforcement in China...well, Hong Kong by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Amazing how on top of the latest trends in people abusing public places, spamming, etc. the chinese police are. Granted, they have a tradition of being viewed as repressive in the US, I was impressed with a small matter I had with a Hong Kong seller not delivering the goods and how they hauled the guy in and grilled him (not literally.) After he scampered home he sent me an email faster than the investigating detective. I get a hit and run in San Jose, CA, and the cops have better things to do... Probably explains a lot of why obvious crime efforts in Spam go unpunished.

    I'm sure the answer exists somewhere in the middle ... it just seems I was lead to believe in a different future by Adam-12 and Dragnet.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  4. Fight SPAM with SPAM by techentin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Isn't it obvious? Spammers annoy everybody because they can do so without cost. The police have found a way to cost them money, which may actually result in less (sticker) SPAM.

    The logical extension is to apply the concepts of open source collaboration for email SPAM. Today a shady business can pay $5000 to a spammer to send 10,000,000 emails, and they get a profit because of the 0.01% response rate. Wouldn't it be a lot more fun if they got 10,000,000 emails and 10,000,000 web hits? Then let them try to sort the wheat from the chaff.

    Stop filtering, and just hit REPLY

  5. Same here in the Netherlands by CvD · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They did this about a year ago here in the Netherlands. Phones listed as stolen were sent a barrage of SMS messages, basically every couple minutes, making the phone nearly unusable (incessant beeping of arriving messages, full inbox, etc)

    In the GSM system, there is a SIM card which is linked to your phone number, subscription, etc. You put this card into your phone and use it. The phone itself has a unique identifyer as well, the IMEI number. It was these serial numbers which were used to identify stolen phones. So putting in a new SIM card won't work, because the phone will still identify itself to the network with its IMEI number.

    I never saw any report on how sucessfull this was, however. I can imagine that in a lot of cases the owner didn't even know it was stolen (if they bought it second hand)...

    Anyways, seems like a good way to harass people who use stolen phones.

    Cheers,

    Costyn.

    --
    The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
  6. Finally, Law Enforcement that makes Sense.... by BaCkBuRn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back in the good ol days officers of the law had discression when it came to interpretation of the law. When I was a youngin and was caught blowing up the neighbors mailbox I wasn't made a posterchild for federal anti-blowing-up-stuff ads like today. I was repermanded by a 7 foot tall ogre with a gun and a badge. I stopped blowing up mailboxes reeeeal fast.
    China's police figured out that jail and fines arent the way to stop most crime. It's all about the psychological punishment of having your phone ring untill your brain explodes. Hopefully more law enforcement agencies will catch on to the use of psycho-enforcement. (yey I coined another buzzword)
    -bb

    --
    PRINT "Signature line broken."
    GOTO 1
  7. Similar problems in VN by dutky · · Score: 4, Interesting
    When I was in Viet Nam we saw these short strings of digits painted on almost every vertical surface in HCMC. Each number was accompanied by a very short message (one or two words in vietnamese) but no other information whatsoever. When I asked our guide about them he told me that those were 'advertisements' and that the numbers were telephone numbers. He also said that the advertisments were highly illegal (because they were eyesores) and that the police would have any number found thus posted shut off by the telephone company (government run, of course).

    While this policy didn't seem to be having a discernable effect in HCMC, we didn't see the advertisements (at least not to the same degree) in other large cities (specifically Da Nang, Hue and Hanoi).