Slashdot Mirror
Declaring War on Mobile Phone Spam
RugbyHoe writes "Silicon.com's Will Sturgeon reports that more than two-thirds of mobile phone users have received spam on their cell phones and raises the concern that spam will become as much of a problem on this medium as it is with e-mail. He continues with a warning that many companies that offer downloadable ring tones are guilty of 'harvesting' your phone number. Think about that the next time you think you need to annoy your neighbors with the latest and greatest fiddy-cent ring tone."
With cellular instant messages, the phone user PAYS!
So far, I've only received one spam, and I talked to my CelTelCo about it. The first 1000 messages are free, but I pay-per-message afterwards.
I'll cancel that feature if I ever get more than 3 in the same week.
...I think that if you have a land line as well as a cell phone, you can probably afford to set up your cell phone as a white-list system (accepting only calls from people in your directory list on the phone's memory). I can think of a few reasons you might not want to do this, but it still seems like a pretty good solution to me.
It's hardly a surprise that this is happening though, this is really no different than what has happened with land-line phones, e-mail and ICQ/IRC in the past. Advertising expands to fill all available spaces. The only difference here is that there is a very quantifiable cost involved with cell phones (unlike the percentage-of-bandwidth types of measurement with e-mail spam). If anything this should speed up the passing of an anti-cellphone spam law. IANAL, but shouldn't the existing laws for landlines also cover cell phones in some cases anyway?
lysergically yours
i mean, come on, the second or third thing i thought when i realized text messaging was coming was that the spammers would inevitably gravitate towards it as the next big thing.
i would imagine we'll see this used to hawk more targeted, narrowly-defined products than x10 cameras.
i hope.
ed
I don't pay for it. If the sender pays, there's still hope. Since there's no such thing as a free lunch, somebody somewhere must have a name and billing address that can be sued. I've certainly not had a SPAM problem on my cell phone, in fact I don't think I've had a single SPAM message.
Of course all those "SMS your answer to XXXX to take part in the competition" all put the "We can send you commercial email" in the fine print, so I don't use it for that. But that makes it solicitated commercial email, which technically isn't SPAM. Just as all the half-hidden checkboxes on free email account sign-ups aren't either.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Vodafone starts filtering SMS-spam as of sometime this month. Here's more information but it's in dutch... I'm not sure if it's happening in the Netherlands only btw.
0x or or snor perron?!
Actually, it IS as easy as sending email - most cellular phones also have an email address (for example, to send to an ATT mobile phone, use ##########@mobile.att.net)
I get TONS of spam, and the ONLY company I have EVER given that number to - MSN Alerts. Hmmmm....
Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep in a shared include somewhere.
Well, except that it was amusing when entering Belgium you get a welcome message for Greece... Typical Orange: since it was taken over by France Telecom, it's just been one long journey downhill.
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Maybe it's time to simply class all the different types of spam (email, telemarketing, SMS, junk mail, FAX) together? - i.e simply have "do not contact" lists rather than different ones for each technology, so when the varblethrumpulator(TM) is invented we don't have to battle for new laws to specifically stop spamming arriving over it...
While I was in Kuwait earlier this year, I noticed the Kuwait Ministry of the Interior sent cell phone SPAM messages almost daily (in English and Arabic) with government "feel good" messages" -
"Remain calm! All is well!"
JH
j.
The trouble is that spam filtering is hard to do, because anybody can send email to whatever address your service provider creates. Anybody know of a way to force email going to that address to first pass through another server, where it can be filtered? Any MX record tricks? I can't see any way to do that. Ideally the service providers would also offer web-mail service for your phone emails, where every email that gets sent to your phone is also stored on that server, and you can read them later and tag your spams, and then they do Bayesian filtering on those. But telecoms always have such hysteresis about adopting new ideas, I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.
Of course as phones begin to run real operating systems rather than some proprietary Nokia OS, and it gets to be easier to write applications for them, you could just do filtering right on the phone. My 3360 doesn't seem to have any options like that, and I can't find much info on how to write applications for these phones either. But, I've only gotten 3 or 4 SMS spams in over a year, so far so good...
AT&T wireless provides an email->SMS gateway already. phonenumber@mobile.att.net will send an SMS to whatever poor shmuck has the number. As far as I can tell, there is no filtering, because I get an average of 4 spams per day on my phone now. It has been getting steadily worse over the last year.
I've never posted my phone number with the domain or used it anywhere, but 10 million spams will cover a whole area code and hit quite a few cell phones, especially if you target the new area codes overlaid specially for mobile devices. Alternately, spammers could harvest phone numbers online (e.g. resumes, personal pages) and compare them against online phone directories, assuming a greater probability of hitting a cell phone with an unlisted number.
The latter is my pet theory for how my own problem got so bad.
I'd like AT&T to implement some filtering and/or a whitelist option.
Just my 2 cents. Take it or leave it. ~Kirk
It can't be that hard to put a simple whitelist filter and a simple web-based management UI in place.
If they don't do that or something else to stem the tide of spam, they'll find themselves minus one customer; the reason I'm with them now is because they're the only provider for the phone I like to use (Samsung SPH-I300) but the major reason I like the phone is because I can use it to ssh to my server from the road -- and if I have to turn off Internet access to kill the spam, I may as well shop for a new phone and a new provider.
And yes, I think the policy of tying phones to providers is part of the problem, but I don't see that changing in the US any time soon.
How do you figure that's the case?
#!/bin/sh
donei=0
while [ $i -lt 10000 ]
do
That doesn't cost you anything more than any other kind of spam, yet you've just sent a message to all of the phones in a particular exchange. Some more tweaking would loop through other exchanges, other area codes, and different service providers.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
You think SMS spam is bad, soon we'll see voice spam. Yes, it's already illegal within most countries to call somebody to play a recording, but the price of the telecom infrastructure is getting low enough to make it productive to do from overseas.
Unlike email and SMS spam, content analysis, filters and bayes will not help you deal with voice spam. The only thing you can do is track high volume users and shut them down.
And caller-ID has less security than you think.
Voice spam will be a curse on VoIP where there are not per minute costs, just bandwidth costs. And while there is security there in the specs, it is rarely implemented.
Solutions will be harder to find here.
The problem is that most cell providers are providing free gateways for pc users to send SMS messages to cell phones, and spammers are sending to every possible combo of cell numbers in a range.
I got hit w. spam a month ago and raised holy hell. Here's how I got even
- Emailed half the advertisers on the spammers' site, telling them that the spam sent on their behalf, because it did not identify itself as a commercial advertisement, was contrary to the local consumer protection act that required ALL commercial telephone solicitations to identify themselves as such, was illegal;
- Let them know that I was holding them jointly liable for the spam
- Complained to the consumer protection office
- Did a whois to see who the ISP was
- Told the ISP that his services were being used for illegal cell-phone spam, quoting the relevant chapter of the consumer protection act
- Called (from teh whois) the tech support guy for the site and gave him shit (blocked caller id on my cell, and when he asked for my number so he could "remove it from the list" told him to go fuck himself)
- Got a bunch of email back from people who removed their ads from the site.
Fucking spammers. Whatever you do, do NOT use any form to unsubscribe from their service. You've just validated that your cell phone number is valid. They want anonymity, remember - 2 can play at that game!The problem is already pretty bad, and the worst part is that the worst offenders are the Telefon companies. Telefonica is constantly sending me SMS messages saying they will let me send 10 messages for free, or suggesting that I might want to change to a different plan etc. It's even worse when roaming outside of Spain. When in Franc for example, every time I change from one carriers tower to another or go under a tunnel, I get a new SMS saying "welcome to France! If you want to check your voice mail on the road, blah blah blah" That pretty much makes the phone more annoying than useful, since it's beeping with a new SMS all day long.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
This is not a joke: I would not mind phone ads, under certain (not current) circumstances.
In the same way that I like advertisers to subsidize the creation of Futurama (well, past tense) and for me to watch reruns of Columbo, I would happily allow advertisers to pay for my phone use.
How? Imagine a system where between each phone call, you agree to listen to an advertisement, which would be (you guessed it) *very* closely tailored to you. e.g., no tampax ads for men, no thinning hair cures for men for 16-year-old girls.
Would I like to have *unsolicted* spam sent to me? No. Would I voluntarily let through a few ads each day in exchange for a bill of zero dollars? Yes.
Note there are a lot of permutations here, could be a limit of free calls, longer ads for more air time, maximum call length without hitting a surcharge, etc.
I would not want an hour of this, but there's probably a happy medium. Ask yourself, are you completely opposed to letting advertisers subsidize other things? And if the answer is No, wouldn't you rather let the spammers (who could be "advertisers") at least chip in toward the useful side of things?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
The SMS Spammers, too, have a price point. Maybe they will find they can tolerate having to spend a cent per message sent in the way some email Spammers have found they can tolerate losing accounts at a rate of one per minute. I don't think MMF scams are that lucrative, but who knows?
But what happens if the price point for the SMS providers and the price point for the SMS Spammers are compatible? You won't see SMS providers kicking SMS Spammers off their network as long as they pay their bill.
In a way, this has already happened in email, thus our spam problems there. It also seems to have happened (to some extent) with telemarketing. I don't know if we'll see this problem develop with SMS, but I do belive many many services are vulnerable to this threat. Will we eventually see a problem of IM spamming (more than we already have)? What about SPAM files on P2Pnetworks? (Oh wait; we've seen that one too.) I wonder how easy it will be to tie a SPAMblaster into a SIP-phone implementation for automated telemarketing once SIP phones become commonplace? I wonder how long after that we'll see a SIP-enabled PROCMAIL filter.
More generally; are we as a society willing to tolerate such SPAM-cancer in all of our communication networks, or will we eventually evolve into a society where we cannot even talk to each other unless we've already been whitelisted?
Free Speech means nothing if we all chosen to go deaf. I sense bad Juju here.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Japan has always been a bit ahead of us in the cellphone business, and they have fixed this problem. No longer does your cellphone have ##########@att-mobile.net, but instead its a 20 character random string (ex: d3f65f2ks8iure0kh8b7@docomo.ne.jp), with the option of setting your own alias as well.
This doesnt entirely alievate the problem, but it does increase the time needed for a while loop to hit the entire user base. Supposedly this has helped.
The number of characters might be variable as well (not sure about this), which would increase the time needed even more.
The way I see it, there is no need to harvest mobile numbers using free phone ringtone services etc. Surely mobile phone numbers can be targeted for sms sending in much the same way as a wardialler - just working through the numbers.