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."
just when I thought that text message about penis enlargement was someone picking me up!
why must you dash my hopes Slashdot?!
Mike
My ringtones have been costing me a dollar each!!!
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 thought that was illegal, since you will pay for them to send you spam. Am I correct about this?
-kaitos
I have got 3 sim cards the first 2 were on vigin mobile a virtual provider who uses T-mobile's network and both of them got a bucketload of spams, now I've got a O2-UK sim card and that number NEVER gets phone spam.
If you're getting a lot of it now might be the time to change operator
There is no god
...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 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. Of course there are ways around this (think cracking), but I think that will stop a lot of spammers.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
In Europe the person *sending* the SMS message pays. This seems like a pretty effective way to stop spam as well!
My state has a "Do Not Call" list which I can sign up with to opt-out of unsolicited marketing calls at home. What about cell phones? Do they fall under these types of laws in most\some\any states?
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?!
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.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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...
Two thirds of who? Unless they surveyed the soccer moms, the 15 year old kids etc- I'd guess the statistic is heavily biased. For example, if it was an internet survey, you just nix'd a HUGE percentage of the population- a percentage of the population which is highly unlikely to have their #'s published on the internet, or use SMS, or even know what the hell SMS is- and I bet companies that send SMS messages to you legitimately(news/sports updates, and the article-mentioned ringtones) are happily selling out every address.
I've -never- recieved spam on my phone. Why? I don't give it to anyone unless they -need- it. I also don't advertise it on my webpage. I don't use sports/news/weather alert crap. There are groups of people who have to give their # out to clients etc, and who put it on their company/personal webpages. They're gonna get spam, that simple.
So where'd that statistic come from? If you scan through the article, you find the source:
"A recent survey conducted by Silicon.com reveals that 69 percent of respondents have received spam on their mobile phone." (side note: the entire article is actually from Silicon.com, some two-bit site).
So, we have a no-name site giving no information about how the survey was conducted(online? People off the street? Telephone? Magazine card? Mobile device convention? All will return drastically different results). We have no information about the demographics of the respondants, and whether they match cell phone users as a whole. Thus it is impossible to verify their claim of "all cell phone users".
When are people going to learn that you CANNOT generalize? You MUST be specific. As an example(and not implying that this is the exact situation in the story)- "Two thirds of respondants at a mobile communications conference said they had received spam on their cell phone". Yet some marketdroid would happily turn that into "two thirds of cell phone users get spam on their cellphone!"
Please help metamoderate.
Code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, Volume 3, Parts 40 to 69
Sec. 64.1200 Delivery restrictions.
(a) No person may:
(1) Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,
(iii) To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call
* Q
P.S. If you don't get this note, let me know and I'll write you another.
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
I've said it before... we need to outlaw all forms of intrusive advertising. By intrusive, I mean directed directly at a recipient (each ad sent one at a time). TV commercials are not such types of ads, but junk (physical) mail, spam, cellphone spam, fliers on your doorknob, fliers handed out in public, and even a salesperson saying to you in a public noncommercial place (not in a store) "Hi how are you today...." It all needs to be made illegal. No freedom of speech issues; there will still be viable (legitimate) ways a business can advertise. Word of mouth, however, is the only legitimate form of advertising. All others are illegitimate but necessary evils (better to have commercials on tv than have to put in a quarter). But all this "direct marketing" should be completely illegal, in every possible form, current or yet-to-be developed. As far as I'm concerned the Direct Marketing Association is a criminal organization. They're almost as bad as NAMBLA.
If we don't outlaw (with SEVERE punishment; jailtime and fines) direct marketing/advertising, eventually all technology will be rendered useless. Write your congressman....
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
This will do more to change SPAM laws than anything else.
Let's be blunt, SPAM is an issue, but most well paid managers either have SPAM filters running on their network or a secretary who sorts through their mail for them.
This will annoy the people who carry cell phones, and they don't have IT departments and secretaries sorting through their cell phone for them.
This will harass the high power salesman who shows off what hot S*** he is by taking phone calls in meetings.
I'm tempted to list off other situations where this will really piss people off, but I won't bother.
Let your imagination run wild, and keep in mind there are people who can't tell the difference between the first "Incoming call" ring and the tone their phone makes, and as a result could find themselves dashing out of the shower for what they think is an important call.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
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.
My number is one digit off from a local radio stations contest line, does that count as spam?
:-)
I badly want to answer "You WIN, come down to the station in the next hour", then turn the phone off.
Bah, my current cellphone recently had it's number changed as the first 3 digits were the dyslexic's choice to dial for a local credit union.
and yes the last 4 were the same.
I gave many people a scare that after answering it normally they still asked for information on their account...
"Yes, mam. your account is overdrawn by $5982.53... no I dont know who.. all it shows is that you came in and withdrew money last sunday... Mam, computers dont lie...."
Or....
"I'm sorry sir, but your account was frozen by the federal government under suspicion of terrorist activities. I cant give out any more information..."
It was quite a blast there for a while
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
...and should be illegal. I want to be careful not to make an assertions that would jeopardize the 1st Amendment, but I feel that telemarketing in general is unethical. Here's my reasoning:
I pay a lot of money for various phone services (> $100/month). Advertising is not one of those services. My phone is not a free ride for marketers.
When telemarketers use the phone line to reach my phone, they are getting a free ride on a service for which I am the one who pays. In a very real sense, I am paying for someone else to have the ability to advertise to me. This is just ridiculous. My land line (which I am essentially required to maintain in order to have certain other utilities) might as well be a direct connection to commercials 24/7. Literally, something like 1 call in 100 is not phone spam. That means I'm paying $20-something dollars per month for the privilege of receiving advertisements. Ridiculous. Would I do this willingly?! Of course not. Do I have a choice? Apparently not. My phone and my wallet are held hostage by telemarketers.
In the UK, SMS spam is starting to become a real problem, but it seems people obey the TPS system. Register your number at http://www.tps-online.org.uk and say goodbye to your troubles. I registered my number a little under a year ago and I haven't got any spam since.
In Finland the caller always pays, and it is illegal to send spam or try to sell stuff via sms. No offence but in most countries people are trying to figure out what Americas cellphone companies are trying to accomplish, cause they just dont seem to know what they are doing.
In Hong Kong, it costs $ to send sms. So, no one sends spam or has $ to send spam. However, company do pay cellular service providers for phone # (trust me, your cellular service provider sells your # and even your phone record for behavior tracking.) and pay to send message (promotions) to those #. Since it costs $, promotional mesg is not very often.
Before I got call intercept service, everytime I got a telemarketing call on my land phone line , this was my conversation with the telemarketer:
Telemarketer - "Sir, my name is Poor_Kid and I am calling on to let you know about our new offer called Rip_you_off"
Me - "Why did you call me on my cellphone"
Telemarketer - "Sir, I am sorry. I did not know that it was your cellphone number"
Me - "You bet it is !! Now take my cellphone number off of your call list."
Telemarketer - "Will do sir. You have a good day."
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.
According to California Business and Professions Code 17538.41 et seq., mobile phone spam is illegal and the victim may recover $500 plus court costs should he bring an action against the spammer.
Zaphod B
When duplication is outlawed, only outlaws will have
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
Do you really need the internet on your phone in the first place? I haven't found a need for it yet. I never use SMS or email to the phone (incoming our outgoing). i don't want to go to web pages on the phone. Ring tones are so damn annoying I refuse to use them. The games you download are cheesy, I don't want to sit there staring at a double sized postage stamp screen playing a lame game.
If I'm away from my computer I don't want to see any email! If people want me they call me and I decide if I want to talk to them or not based on caller ID. If I don't answer then either I don't want to talk to them or I'm in a situation where answering would be rude, but its up to the caller to guess which one is correct. If they email the phone they know that I got it unless it bounces back. I don't want that.
So whats the point?
I'm sick of hearing about the "War on" this or the "War on" that. As a civilization we're well past this cheap and easy metaphor. Why "war on" anything? How well have our past "Wars" gone:
- LBJ's war on poverty
- Nixon's war on cancer
- Reagan's war on drugs
- W's war on terrorism
To paraphrase the best source for "War" info: remember when we had that war on drugs and now there aren't drugs anymore?Seems having a "War on" something makes it omnipresent and ustoppable.
-dameron
"Uh hello?"
"HI! How would YOU like to be the first on your block to buy a mint commerative Asian penis enlarging hair restoring stay hard college loan credit reducing pyramid scheme from Africa?"
"Capn' Taco! It's for you."
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.
I find it amusing that as I read this article, Slashdot is displaying banner ads for "49 cent ringtones and graphics!", "Free Nokia Ringtones", and "RingtoneJukebox.com."
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.
Free service and helps like a charm.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
That's partly why they all have shiney new infrastructure while the U.S. is struggling to roll out last-generation technology!
I know! Let's bomb ourselves back into the stoneage, and then give ourselves the money to rebuild our industries with the latest equiptment!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff