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."

Comments

the most annoying thing is

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

personally....

[Transient0]

...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?

Re:Pricefight

[cwiegand]

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....

Government SPAM

[BladeRider]

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

Re:Pricefight

[ncc74656]

I think phone spamming will never get to the height of e-mail spamming. The reason is simple: sending out bulk e-mail costs almost nothing, sending out bulk phone messages is way more expensive.

How do you figure that's the case?

#!/bin/sh

i=0
while [ $i -lt 10000 ]
do

echo "Baked beans are off!" | mutt -xs "Lovely spam, wonderful spam..." 702555`echo $i | awk '{i=sprintf("0000%i",$0); printf("%s",substr(i,length(i)-3, 4))}'`@mobile.example.com
i=`expr $i + 1`

done

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.

Get ready for something worse -- voice spam

[HiKarma]

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.

Re:legal?

[tomhudson]

It depends on your plan. You can get el-cheapo cell plans that charge for eveery incoming and outgoing plan, and you can get plans that give you pretty-much-free (mine has a limit of 2500 free messages each month) incoming messages, and n number of outgoing messages (in my case, I took 75/month for $5, but you can go as low as 2 cents a message if you want to send a "lot").

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

1. 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;
2. Let them know that I was holding them jointly liable for the spam
3. Complained to the consumer protection office
4. Did a whois to see who the ISP was
5. Told the ISP that his services were being used for illegal cell-phone spam, quoting the relevant chapter of the consumer protection act
6. 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)
7. 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!