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US Cell Phone Users Discover SMS Spam
The Llama King writes "It's a bigger problem in Europe and Japan/Asia, but as SMS text messaging or "texting" becomes more popular in the United States, its users are discovering that spammers like it too, according to this Houston Chronicle story. Cell phone companies are trying to stem the spam flood before it starts, worried that users will turn off their phones, thus denying providers revenue."
"Unlike Internet spam, wireless phone spam comes with an annoying beep on your phone and a direct price tag," said Janee Briesemeister, senior policy analyst with the Consumers Union in Austin. "Consumers aren't just getting an annoying message they didn't want, they are paying 10 cents for it."
Perhaps because this will directly affect people's pocketbooks we'll see faster legislation. Not unlike taxes, when people start losing money, the louder they become.
Mike
Upgrade ur mobile nw to the l8est nokia fones.
Pah.
Get your own free personal location tracker
An easy solution exists for this. The cell phone shouldn't accept text messages from someone the user has called the number previously or unless the number exists in the contacts listing.
What's the odds of getting messages from someone whom you have never spoken with on the phone previously?
Of course, this could be an enabled or disabled option.
Daval
I have found that the IM forwarding feature on some of the more recent betas of AOL Instant Messenger to be quite handy.
GF could message me from AIM and I could call her back without her or I incurring any charges (incoming SMSs are free).
So now I am going to get spammed by SMS because it has to be EXTREMELY easy to send to number@mobile.att.net. Great.
What I am more worried about is my phone auto-answering. I was at work and heard a voice coming out of my phone. It was a telemarketer. The phone actually picked this call up by itself. Great. I had to call AT&T and have them investigate to remove the minute charges...
The cell phone shouldn't accept text messages from someone *UNLESS* the user has called the number previously or unless the number exists in the contacts listing.
Sorry. Too tired to be posting.
Davak
In our family, we call it "honey messaging...", as in, "Honey will you pick up a gallon of milk on the way home?" or "Honey, remember that I love you..."
SMS is great for sending short and sweet messages that requires no acknowledgement, and would be intrusive if sent.
It really is instant messaging for cell phones...we love it. And having the ability to have things SMS to me (for example, updates on my flight from United) if fantastic.
charge the sender of all SMS's 5 cents
give recipients a penny credit on their bill
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Since it has been outlawed many years ago. I haven't received a single spam during the time I had a cell phone (4.5 years).
the big question is: why the hell do SMSs cost 5-10 cents? for god sakes, i condense my conversation and take a fraction of the bandwith of a voice call so these rat-bastards can charge extra for it. it just ain't right unless you're talking about spam-deterrent, and spam-deterrent it ain't. it's just another case of companies charging money where they can, not where they ought to. i'll be more than happy to pay for the blades AND the razor but for fuck sakes charge the right price for 'em. and you may wonder why the economy is tanking - because, as i've outlined above, it's ficticious bullshit and wether or not people realize it, they're sick of it.
Hmm.. Software that blocks text messages like personal firewall block connections. Sounds like a business idea to me! I already have a sofware that receives/sends SMS and creating such a filter isn't a big deal. Big deal is how to integrate software to cell phones (currently it runs on Windows CE only). Where the heck is my CodeWarrior...
You don't know what you don't know.
Having recently moved to Australia from Canada, I was:
(1) Surprised to see that all inbound calls, text, and airtime were free on my mobile plan.
(2) My outbound costs were ~6x greater than before (au$0.60/min vs cnd$0.10/min)
(3) My text sending costs were lowered.
(4) There was no charge for flagfall. But now fsck'ing Vodafone plans to change that. (Australia is one of the few countries where the cost of telecom seems to rise. Yech)
From a quick look into the situation, you pay nothing to receive SMS everywhere but North America.
But, you certainly pay to send SMS, which is a sure deterrent to Spam.
Hence, switch to a sender-pays model. Problem solved if the cost to send exceeds expected revenue from spamming. If current e-mail response rates (1%) hold, it'll be a non-issue.
I'd love to hear of countries outside Canada/US where there are charges to receive SMS though. That would blow this theory out of the water.
They accept cell phone numbers, and I am getting it on my phone via my phone number. Also, most people don't pay to receive SMS, just to send it. So, the companies are worried about losing revenues from the spammers who pay to send (and of course the chance they'll scare off regular users.)
How dumb is that?
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The problem with SMS spam is that it is mostly scams being operated by shady businesses, urging you to text back to this number (premium charge, or course) to win a vapour-prize, or dial-this-number-to-win etc. With the advent of SMS gateways years ago, sending bulk SMS-spam from a computer is fairly easy. Since most operators need to accept traffic from others to ensure connectivity, getting rid of the problem would involve too much pain IMO. My money is on end users having to live with it.. just like we do in the UK. The only lesson to be learnt is to be extremely careful who you give your personal information to. Treat your mobile number like your personal email address.
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
Don't sign up for a mycingular.com account if you have a Cingular Wireless phone. I was (inaccurately) told by a Cingular operator that in order to get an email address (email -> SMS) for my phone I had to create an account on cingular.com.
A few months later I got a spam text message on my phone from a third party advertiser targeting cingular wireless users. The only way that could have happened is if Cingular sold my info. I was fuming mad and wrote Cingular's division headquarters. I received a phone call in response to the letter, and the woman said I did not need a cingular.com account for Email -> SMS gateway, and the only reason to sign up for mycingular.com is to download ringtones and such. (and there are far better places to get those) She cancelled the cingular.com account for me on the spot.
So beware if you do sign up at cingular.com - Cingular SPAMs you from third party advertisers!
To Cingular's credit, they were very responsive after I sent the letter.
Unfortunately though, I just got another junk message from Cingular themselves the other day, I can't even remember what they were advertising. If that happens again, it's one more nail in the coffin for them. Although I wonder if I'll get the same thing no matter what carrier I choose these days.
I wonder how long it will take before spammers start bruteforcing phone numbers at mobile.mycingular.com. (that's the email -> phone gateway, yourphone#@mobile.mycingular.com)
--Mike
.. was (now its legislated a bit) that subscribing to SMS services like getting a SMS when your stock options change, when a new sex message has been generated for you (yes you can subscribe to that here) or when a new news headline happens, is that registring for it is easy enough. Just send "sex on" to number 6969, however turning these services off again was near-impossible. Unless you are creative enough to figure out that turning it off needed "no more sex please" to 9696
:)
Oh and every message they send you is $1.50 a piece.
Anyway I can't really say I have ever received SMS spam, and I've had a GSM for 5+ years now. But just as with email spam, I have been conscious about not listing my number in phonebooks and not putting it into any casual 'please fill out this info' forms. I suggest you do the same
That's simply not true. I don't have a SMS plan and I still get spam [from my provider no less] about BS like upgrading services and how the Senators were doing in the playoffs.
That sort of BS not only pisses me off [SMS can crash v120c phones] but can cost money.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I new the US mobile system was fucked up, but I didn't think it was that bad.
Sure sounds like you're getting royally ripped off.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I can't wait until I start getting ASCII porn messages on my phone.
"Much work is lost, for the lack of a little more." -Edward H. Harriman
I make two first-hand notes about SMS spam:
1. I live in Europe, have had an SMS-capable cell phone for two years, and have never received a single piece of SMS spam. I credit this with never having given to any logo/ringtone website my phone number, and let me tell you, I much prefer not getting spam to having a nice ringtone.
2. I have never understood the US SMS pricing scheme; the idea that one would have to pay for messages received completely baffles me, and I think it threatens to be the single largest reason that SMS spam will have such a profound effect on US consumers.
Providers should just not charge per message. It's ludicrous that you have to pay more for one shitty, short text message than you have to pay for a full minute of voice communication.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...when you can just go after the companies that hire them.
Now I know this might not work for international stuff like the Nigerian scam, but it should work for domestic spam. And though I don't yet recieve SMS spam, the vast majority of my e-mail spam seems to originate from domestic companies.
I mean, in order to sell a product or a service, you have to provide your vict^h^h^h^h, customers with valid contact information so that they can purchase the product. Jon Q. Fucktard can't purchase herbal viagra or a "real university degree" without knowing where to send the check.
Removing the financial incentive to hire spammers will be far more effective than trying to control it through technological means.
I work for a wireless telco, and we have some techniques in place to guard against spammers. Nothing is 100% perfect, but we make it easier to catch.
1. Using subscriber ID's that are 16 digit long, phone+random number. (To protect against that type of subscriber ID spamming, numerical increasing.)
2. Intelligent email servers, that flag large requests and put them in queues that our NOC can monitor. Thou they have to trip the threshold.
3. Corporate customers who use SMS for dispatch, use dedicated connections. (No public connection for spammers to exploit.)
4. You can opt-out from telco originated spam, which is very few a day. (And opt-out works, not like spammers.)
Nothing is perfect, SMS is just like any other messaging system that can be abused, IM and Email. You dont want to filter to hard and block valid requests, yet you dont want spammers to eat your bandwidth.
I myself use SMS for trouble tickets, email alerts on systems, and escalation notifications. I finally directed most of my SMS to a pager instead of my phone. Dont want to mix IM's with work. And I can turn my pager off when I'm not on-call.
-
WC3+AVP+CS=Natural Selection A free half-life mod.
Add layers of unnecessary complexity to phone software. Sure, that's the way to do it.
The sane solution is to make the sender pay, just like they do in the rest of the world...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If you work it out, then paying 5p / text message is the equavalent to paying over £450 per megabyte
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You guys invented it, welcome to the real world
the big question is: why the hell do SMSs cost 5-10 cents? for god sakes[snip]
Right, multi-billion dollar networks should be FREE! Lunch too!
Check out the rate charges for Businesses over at ATTWS
I have to say that the way it works here in Oz is great for the most part - the sender pays for the SMS message, not the receiver.
The only change to this is if you SMS someone who is overseas and who is using AutoRoam (GSM rest-of-world-only, sorry USA). Then I can SMS that person and only pay for a local SMS, the overseas portion is billed to the person overseas at the time.
I've never had any SMS spam (other than one or two SMSs from my phone provider which were borderline spam advertising new services but not overly disturbing).
Now imagine if the sender pays system were implemented in email in some fashion.... we'd kill spam virtually overnight!
The big issue with email is that, like P2P music trading, it's been free for so long that people don't want to go back to a paying system. So a solution to spam would need to involve return credits of some sort, so if I email my friend it costs me 1c but he can negate that automatically, so only those spammers whose emails aren't wanted don't get their money back. The devil's in the details though, but food for thought!
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
It's exactly this sort of logic that has prevented any meaningful progress in the War Against E-mail Spam. Even though you don't see it on your bill, E-mail spam DOES cost the end user in money and time, just like SMS spam. Spammers would have you believe that spam is "free" and of course their favorite argument, "It's easy to just hit delete". But, as many of us know, this argument is misleading. Certainly this line of thinking would have some validity if we just received one or two pieces of spam a day. However, the truth of the matter is that for someone who makes $20 or $30 an hour, a half an hour a day to wade through 100s of E-mail spams beccomes quite costly. All of the sudden, 10 or 20 SMS spams a day at $0.10 a pop look cheap in comparison. And this doesn't even begin to touch upon the added costs in equipment, bandwidth and personnel that ISPs have to procure to store, send/receive and try to stem the flood E-mail spam. Those costs almost certainly will be passed on to the customer as well.
We need to try to get rid of ALL spam. Whether it's SMS, E-mail, dead tree, fax or whatever.
I absolutely refuse to tolerate any SMS spam on my cellphone. My gripe is not so much the cost as the inconvenince of having my phone go off every thirty seconds, then trying to sift through to figure out what's legitimate. The first time I get an SMS spam, I'm having the "feature" disabled on my phone since SMS will then become completely useless.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
in China SMS spams are usually falling three categories:
:)
:)
1) Broadcasting messages
2) Bulk messages sent ad companies via your carrier
3) Your boring friends
1) could be easily stopped by turning off your mobile phone's ability in receiving broadcast messages(I'm sorry if you don't know how). 2) are sent from some advertising companies which signed deals with your mobile carrier such that you can't screen them off as in 1), but you can always ask your mobile carrier to get you off from their advertising bulk list or face lawsuit. Unless, of course, your service agreement explicitly revoked your right in denying advertising(have you read it before signing it?).
Man 3) is hardest to stop, in view of the fact that each SMS message only cost them less than $0.1 RMB(US$0.014)!
The spammers are pouring in everywhere, deliberately causing damage, ruining it for everyone. Who would want to do something like that? What is going on in their small minds? As it turns out, not much.
I've been told that cell phone numbers are supposed to be confidential in Canada (in other words: Foobar inc. won't be able to find your cell number (unless you write/say it everywhere to everyone, of course))
I used SMS a bit with one friend of mine, and none of us recieved a single SMS spam.
Someone else in this thread said to get rid of the spam from the source, not the destination - I think thats not totally true. Since SMS spam looks like e-mail spam so much, why dont mobile service providers add some software to block SMS spams before they send SMS to the user? Its a bit like Hotmail (or whatever e-mail service) spam filtering.
While im at it, it would be nice to have a spam filtering web interface on your cell provider's website that acts a bit like hotmail custom filters, for example: "If text contains 'free viagra', do not send" and so on.
My 2 canadian cents (thats $0.01 USD).
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
After the (most recent!) Florida debacle, the **AA would probably:
As you could imagine, we also have a high concentration of people who don't know how to use cell phones that "use" cell phones here. (May be a southern redneck thing) Anyways, especially on late night Fridays (Saturday mornings at 2 -3am) I get an unknown data call. Several times, I have instantly tried to call the person back. Sometimes, I get no answer. Most times I get, "Oh I'm sorry, I was testing out my phone!" or "I was trin to mess my homies, bro"
Just recently, this activity is increased. I have alerted Cingular about it and they said there's nothing they can or will do.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I have had the same GSM number for the last 5 years now. It is listed on public phone books and on the GSM phone books as well. I have never received SMS spam. We here in some countries in Europe have very good laws already against SMS Spam.
If I for instance was ever to receive SMS spam, I would request the local appropriate authorities to look into it and the company would get automatically (eventually) fined for each of the received complaints.
Finland, the home of the cellural technology, rocks.
ICSTIS, who regulate the premium rate telephone market - most of my SMS spams are shilling premium rate numbers, claiming that "I have won a prize" or that "someone likes me". ICSTIS have fined many spammers thousands of pounds.
There is also the Advertising Standards Authority who are now accepting complaints.
It is also illegal to use an automated dialler, but the bunch of lazy jobsworths at the Data Protection Agency can't be bothered to prosecute.
First, I have a cell phone. I've had various cell phones since 1995. It's not some new whiz-bang toy to me. My current PCS phone service is simply that. Phone service, voicemail, 3-way calling, and a few other things. No SMS, no Wireless Web. The only feature I want right now is a modem attachment for my laptop.
Now, about the article. Did anyone else get the feeling that turning off a cell phone would be the end of the world? This SMS spam thing might be good thing. I won't have to listen to so many damn annoying ringers when I'm sitting in a public place. What happened to the good old pleasant chirps / rings?
Dammit, I'm SO very close to building a PCS phone jammer. So very close. In fact, the only reason I haven't is that they're HIGHLY illegal. I'm fed up with people that constantly take calls, chatting about idle nonsense. I don't mind those people that actually take / make calls to get / send information. It's the ones that talk on the phone just to talk that get to me. Just yesterday, I was standing in line at a local fastfood place, and some woman just in front of me in line spent the entire time she was standing there gossiping with a friend about a 3rd friend. I don't need to know that! Sometimes, a cluebat would come in handy... It's as if some people think you can't hear their side of the conversation, when they're standing 3 feet away from you! She was even rude enough to keep the phone to her ear while she placed her order. She even asked the guy at the register to hold on a sec, while she finished listening to whatever juicy bit of gossip. I SWEAR.
Dammit, that felt good. People need to rant and rave every now and again, even if they're screaming into a vacuum.
Michael C. Hollinger
The 5-10 cents is an over-quote. With my plan, I get 300 incoming SMS messages a month, any more than that they charge you $2 or $3 for an extra 50, etc. I imagine other cell phone plans are similarly structured. Text messages aren't free, but they're included with the price of the plan in most cases.
All the companies have to do is put a term in their EULA that the text messaging system is not to be used for any sort of commercial bulk mailing, then sue the brains out of any and all spammers they can track down. They don't need any new law.
Repeal the DMCA!
Damn, I'm too tired to be reading, I didn't even see the difference until you pointed it out.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
It used to be you could get 200 day time minutes, 400 first-incoming minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, and also have roaming, etc -- with evenings starting at 6 pm -- for about 35$ cdn a month.
Now they evenings start at 8. If evenings start at 9 there (when they're pracitcally into the night), I'd hate to see which direction your cell company is going, especially since I negotiated 10$ off of my 35$ CDN a month. You a lot pay more than I do for marginally worse service.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
This maybe true, but it isn't what the user is paying for - they are paying for the service.
If it's too expensive, don't use it! Personally I think texting is convenient and less intrusive than interrupting a person with a phone call to ask a quick question which is neither urgent or important (e.g. where are you going out tonight). I use it a lot and pay the extra, and am happy for this service.
-- Mike
With leaner, less profitable but better technological systems. It is like ISDN and Frame Relay: the California phone company resisted replacing them with DSL for years, because the former were so much more profitable. The consumers of California lost out, having to wait extra years for cheap DSL to be widely available.
At that point, companies can trace SPAMMERS, block them, or sue them in court. Today, half the problem is identifying who these people are because e-mail is so loose on the addressing issue.
Why would you want legislation after debacles like the DMCA (which almost all Senators hold up as their crowning success) and with idiots in office like Senator "Disney" (D-SC) and Orin Hatch (R-UT)?
Computer Science is Applied Philosophy
Where'd you get the incorrect idea that mobile-originated SMS sending is free in the US? It's not - depending on carrier it's usually 5 cents or 10 cents to send a message.
Of course you can buy packages that include a quota of SMS, but one way of the other, sending SMS is always incurring a cost, if you send from the phone.
But anybody can send an email to number@vtext.com or number@mobile.att.net, etc - I'd guess that most SMS spam is origninated either via email to the standardized email address of the phone's SMS, or via the carriers' websites for sending messages. I can't imagine the spammer is using an actual mobile to send them.
I have a bigger question: Why do we have to pay for incoming anything? I know that in other countries (such as Brazil), that doesn't happen.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I thought I had been going crazy. This has been happening to me for at least a month. I HATE SPAM!
We're only gonna die from our own arrogance, that's why we might as well take our time...
Why do we have to pay for incoming anything?
Because people want to allow SMS messages from people who don't have an account with your cell phone company (or any cell phone company, for that matter). Someone has to pay, and the phone company can't collect from the sender, so they collect from the recipient.
If you don't want to pay for this, I'm sure you can call your phone company and have them shut it off. And I bet if you complained about these messages being sent without your permission, you'd be able to get the charges taken off (at least for the first month, after that you better turn it off if you don't want it).
And, furtheromore, those of you that ARE the people in line in front of him behaving in an uncivilized manner, LEARN from him and everyone else that is so very frustrated with your lack of consideration! ...I now submit MY story of an inconsiderate cell phone user.
I was hanging out with some friends late one night and we found our way to this strange new restaurant called Denny's. It being prom night, this place was filled with High School kids and we were sat across from a young couple. The guy on this date was so busy yapping on his cell phone for the better part of 20 minutes that he didn't even bother to hang up when their dinner arrived, thus completely ignoring his date! Naturally, I had no choice but to take it upon myself to start flirting with his date (and, yes, I did do this in hopes he'd hang up and pay attention to her). Long story short (too late) he did hang up, but not because of my flirting. Rather, his food was getting cold (or that's what he told the other person). After he hung up, he was more than willing to hang all over her and mad dog me, but he didn't seem to care about her too much when he was on the phone.
Damn...that does feel good! Though I don't think I'll be screaming into any vacuums anytime soon. Last time I did that, it sucked all the saliva out of my mouth and I had cottonmouth for a week!
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
It's the whole 'local calls are free' thing. In the free incoming countries, they generally pay by the minute for ALL calls, and cell phones are a different (higher cost) number zone. If the cell phone companies didn't charge for incoming calls, people would chat from fixed phone to cell phone all day long. (Not that they don't now, but they PAY to do that).
I don't read AC A human right
Jeez. It's no wonder you're getting royally ripped off in America.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
here's the best way to make it work. The recipient of a spam SMS message should be able to contact the phone company and receive a refund. The phone company should then be able to sue the sender of the message. The phone company is the one with all the information about the sender, not the recipient.
This should be how it works for email spam, too, except that we don't pay for incoming email.
they won't get much. Maybe they should sue for money...no, that won't work either. Hmm. What to do?
Ever wondered why you can set the ringtone type, or no sound, or even ignore for numbers in your phone book, but you can't do the same for receiving SMSs? It's trivial to implement that at the protocol level. On the other hand, with costs ranging from 7-15 cents per SMS, spammers do have to think twice before blinding sending to sequential numbers ala Direct IP spamming.
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
Repeat after me: exaggeration. Good.
I used 2 of the main mobile companies in Turkey when I was there 3 years ago. Neither had a plan like the one I described (a set number of minutes free a month) or free long distance and both had incredibly high rates per-minute compared to the plan I described.
In South African, the network operators force senders of commercial SMS to sign a code of practice (see www.smscode.co.za). They also allow you the consumer to report unsolicited SMS spam through the same site.
If you a company continues to send you SMS (or even email) spam after you have requested that they unsubscribe you, then you can lay a criminal charge against them in terms of the lectronic Communications and Transactions Bill (www.ectbill.co.za)
The way they get your number is when you PAY to download a ringtone or whatever from a 3rd party site and have it sent to your phone, they harvest those numbers, I've not gotten one on my phone in 3 years because I refuse to partake in that crap.
It's hitting the trendy money-to-spend hipsters out there, not bothering me.
Yeah, right! It would be NICE if we only had to worry about true "spammers" sending unsolicited SMS. In my market (Southern California) Cingular is spamming its own users with marketing messages! Talk about stupid business decisions.
I cancelled my SMS service and let them know why. Cingular claims it's "opt-out", but strangely three different methods they recommend (return SMS, phone call to CSR, website) have failed to get me off their list.
Oh well at least my voicemail still works. My contract is up soon... maybe some readers can recommend which providers do and don't spam their own users?
In Australia, local phone calls aren't free, but they're untimed. Calls to mobiles are timed, and thus more expensive.
However, mobiles have separate area codes to landlines, so its always possible for a caller to know that they're going to be charged more. It also means that you can move across the country and keep the same mobile number...
Every cellular provider in the USA already has online billing and account maintainence. None of them have bothered to do anything like this that I know of, so it's safe to assume they don't care...
God Bless America! Please??? She needs it!
Remember:
- Many plans bill you $0.10 per SMS message.
- You can send free SMS messages from the carrier's web site.
- Spammers can use programs to post hundreds, perhaps thousands of SMS send message requests to carrier web sites.
- If a spammer sends 1,000 SMS messages from AT&T's web site per minute, AT&T makes $6,000/hour from that spammer.
Seems like a win/win system, doesn't it? Spammers get to spam for cheap, and your carrier makes big bucks as well. If corporate interests aren't at stake, why should U$ courts become involved or even care?
Best part of it all, some phones cannot even outright disable SMS messaging, and phone reps can't even turn it off. Another corporate Gotcha!
You are missing the point.
Why does an SMS message, that takes an infinitesimal amount of bandwidth, cost $.10, when (on some plans) a minute of two-way voice communication costs about $.30?
If you don't think that price is inflated, you're insane.
Hell, BOTH of those prices are inflated. Which is why I don't own a mobile phone.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
We here in some countries in Europe have very good laws already against SMS Spam.
Finally, all of Europe even has very good legislation against spam in general:
Directive 2002/58/EC, Article 13:
In a nutshell: Technology-neutral opt-in, with only a few, rather reasonable exceptions, but no gaping loopholes.
It's a new concept for Europe either. Now, if Americans have to suffer from spam for years whenever a new technology comes along, call your "congressperson" to explain why they don't make a law like this. Hint: Their answer (post it!) should not contain poor "red herring" excuses citing the "First Amendment" or the "Dormant Commerce Clause" if they count on being re-elected: The courts have already decided that it is perfectly constitutional to wham spam with a ban by federal law.
As long as the sender pays, there will be little or no spam. That's pretty easy. US telcos - over to you.
-----
For great justice!
Wonderful solution. I will actually write to Nokia and Siemens about this, as well as all German mobile phone companies (I live in Germany).
This may seem like a stuipd question, but in the US do you generally pay to send or to receive SMS?
In Europe (and most of the rest of the world that uses GSM networks AFAIK) you generally pay a small fee (about 10c) to send each SMS message. This makes sending SMS spam far more expensive than with e-mail, as a result of which there is no widespread problem of SMS spam.
the big question is: why the hell do SMSs cost 5-10 cents?
Because that is what people are willing to pay for it. Price is not determined by cost alone, but also by demand and value.
I got my first SMS spam a couple of months ago and promptly complained to T-Mobile. The rep pointed me to their text messaging which includes some simple spam filters. I haven't gotten any SMS spam since.
Does this
I think it'll only be a day or two before spammers simple start spamming random phone numbers against yahoo.com. Especially given Verizon's big advertising push right now to promote "SMS your friends through Yahoo!" Is everyone certain Yahoo.com won't sell that list? Is everyone certain Verizon won't sell that list???
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Why not simply attach a small bit of legistlation that says that if you put a cell phone number on the donotcall list that you should receive data as well as voice spam?
If you want the phone companies to decide what messages to accept and what messages to drop, it's better to have some kind of configurable buddy list, and ideally to have the option for the phone company to offer to maintain a web-accessible reject-bucket for your text messages, because there *will* be messages you might have wanted.
What your phone does with incoming messages is a separate question - you might want to have _it_ decide which messages to alert you about and which ones to just leave in an inbox or reject-bucket.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There is normally a website or address advertised.
I find that between 8,000 and 16,000 mails quickly shut these people down.
It is very difficult to sort through legitimate responses and because the have to give a web address in their advert the owner or funding partner is readily locateable.
There was an SMS spammer in the UK who continued spamming me and I mail bombed them. I continued to get sms spam. I did some further digging to find out that they were jointly owned by a French ISP and Yahoo. Another 8,000 emails later to abuse@yahoo.co.uk quickly resolved the situation.
I now get very few SMS spam.
Most spam you recieve on your phones in the US comes through the company's website (i.e. nextel.com, cingular.com, vtext.com) --- These, of course are logged.. the IP addresses are logged. Unfortunately its most likely either someone out of the country or someone behind a proxy. A solution would have to be done more in the idea of limiting the amount of messages from a given IP address, etc. Since most cellular companies can make money each time a phone goes over its amount of messages, they probably just won't stop it until its gotten out of hand and starts creating a customer loss for the company.
Right, and if you don't use email you won't get spam. If you never leave your house you won't get run over by a truck either. So, what should we do, just say fuck it and leave it be? Why did you bother to even post such a redundant statement?
Email spam didn't take off until a few things became widely available: harvestable email addresses and email clients with clickable URLs. Cell phone numbers/addresses cannot (yet, to my knowledge) be gathered automatically in large quantities. And cell phones aren't such a good click-thru medium. Most of my email spams say "Want to buy this? Want to see learn how to? Want to see her naked? *Click here*" Those same propositions are going to be even less interesting on my little Nokia LCD. If email spam has a razor thin margin, how profitable will phone spam be?
Sure, gateways can be brute-forced. What if SMS gateway providers throttled senders: no more than say ~10 uniquely addressed texts per hour from the same sender IP address?
bitchtitz
I can only vaguely understand the profitability of spam mail. I suppose it has something to do with people clicking on one of the links inside the mail, and then getting routed to about 100 porn sites that then give the original sender money for the free hits etc.
But how are phone spams ever going to be half as useful on the same scale? They can't really send links, and even if they did, its a damn phone. Even with browser capabilities the whole mojo of the thing is all wrong.
I can see something akin to TV advertisments forth coming though (blingity blong! Drink Sprite!) And while this sort of saturation bombing style advertising is still on the fringe, eventually major retailers are going to pick up on it.
I think the Dream advertising on "Futurama" and realize that the only thing that prevents that from happening, is the fact that the technology doesn't exist yet.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
AT&T Wireless spammed me - once. I called customer service, told them that by no means did I want such things, and I haven't gotten one since.
"I just feel disgusted," Merino said. "I said that I wasn't ever going to turn off my phone, but I did this morning. It was annoying."
That will not help her, since SMS messages are buffered and will be delivered when the phone is turned back on.
ObNelson: Ha-ha!
bash$
Verizon Wireless charges 2 per message received and 10 per message sent for their basic package.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Maybe because bandwidth is a small part of the total cost of building and maintaining an SMS infrastructure.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Why do we have to pay for incoming anything?
Um, because you've chosen a provider that charges for incoming messages? There are companies that don't charge for incoming messages -- AT&T, for one.
Do those rates include calling anywhere within Europe, or only within the very small area of your own country?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You bet SMS has a very high profit margin. However, it seems that Vodafone in Australia are about to change their voice-calling plans because they want to bump up their SMS profits even more!
Here's the story from ZDNet.
Oh, and the reason why inbound calls and text are all free is that the person who calls you pays more than to call a landline.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
To be honest, 5-10c is an over-quote for me too. With my plan (T-Mobile) i get 50 free and anything after is 5c a pop. i think it's $3 extra for 500 (pre-planned). Even knowing the details, it's still more than it should be.
I'd like to share my letter to US Cellular:
I (through my parents primary accounts) have been using US Cellular phones for almost ten years. Recently I have become very disappointed in US Cellular's service. I had been promised features that never surfaced and have dealt with several crappy Motorola V120x phones not working. My most recent concern is this: With the creation of the National Do Not Call Registry, many people suspect that SMS spam will become a large problem for cellular phone users. I would like you to know that personally, if i get even the slightest amount of SMS spam, I will leave US Cellular without a thought and be on a Nextel contract like white on rice on a paper plate in a snowstorm. If however, I get no SMS spam, and (ideally) the feature that was once promised to me (the ability to send e-mail from my phone via SMS) is arranged, I will continue my faithful patronage of USCC. Thank you for any and all consideration.
mmm...hate mail feels good...
That's what I had to do -- spammers found out my Verizon text messaging number a year or two back. I had to pay for each message I got (even though I had a flat rate service for more minutes/month that I usually use. No - they couldn't take excess minutes and credit them to the text messaging. I could call them for each spam received and receive a credit for each message -- just like I can call them and get 1 whole minute credit when their system drops me in dead (but busy, traffic wise) zones.
I can be on phone hold with some company (Dell, Kaiser, etc.) for over 20 minutes, then just as they answer, I can get a drop, and Verizon is willing to add 1 minute to my call allowance for that month. However each service call
to Verizon to do this runs 5-10 minutes of real time (no air time charges, but
who has 10 minutes to earn the equivalent of $0.60 dollars/hour? They
count on that.
Not enough competition. I was in Europe a few years back -- Israel of all
places -- *ALL* the teens had cell phones. Turns out it's about 1/10th the cost here in California. From what I've been told, California's rates
are among the worst -- so much so that I've thought of getting a phone for
outgoing calls through my parents located in another area where cell phone
rates with full roaming and free long distance running half what I pay
here.
Anyway -- I asked if I could specify a list of allowed users -- nope. Basically, anyone who knew my number and some magic incantation could send
me spam. Ironically -- at the time, I didn't know how to send my phone
text messages via an email port -- but the spammers did! So I requested
they disable the service completely.
I sure as heck don't need spam on my stupid cell phone where I have to
pay per/spam. That should be as illegal as sending unrequested faxes.
Grrr.
> It's a bigger problem in Europe and Japan/Asia
I live in Asia and have had an SMS-capable handset for over 5 years now, and I've probably received about 30 pieces of SMS-spam in that time and from only 3 or so distinct numbers.
We use a sender pays model; this is not a problem in Asia, and the extrapolation that because we send more SMS messages we have more SMS spam is incorrect.
In Australia during the F1 race we had a very clever case of "Spamvertising". The telco Vodaphone sent "Go Ferarri" to phones and it showed for a few days in the area that normally displays which signal tower you are nearest to.
So far I have seen it used for "Drink Coke" but it cant be far off.
Well many people, such as Sprint PCS users do have to pay to recieve SMS since they must go into the wireless web browser and use a web based (read: slow and very non-robust) to access all phone messaging. It is one of the most annoying parts of the PCS service which in other areas is quite good.
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
No sooner than I activated my Sprint phone a few months back, I started getting regular spam from MSN. Apparently MSN has some news/sports/etc. service that I never signed up for, but that they decided I should get.
How did they even get my phone's address, within hours of activation? At first I assumed that I had inadvertently enabled this through Sprint when I activated the phone. Sprint was clueless about this and it seemed like the only way to opt out on MSN's site required registering an MSN account first. Finally I just sent an e-mail to abuse@msn.com, and they responded and the spam ceased.
dude, you're so tired you even got your own name wrong.
- theed
taxes have been and were unconstitutional for a long long time, the original income tax was raised to pay for war
and never repealed.. like so many other stupid laws we have
Americans have created the steaming shit hole gov't we under by their own complacency
people didn't care when it went from writing checks to having them take it out of their paychecks
they didnt' care when the original tax of ONE percent was levied (and considered outrageously high then, we're tlaking revolutionary war days here) and no caps were put on it because they never thought it would get higher, much less where it is now
and all long before I or most of the people who post here were born
the bottomline is people don't care until it affects their DAILY LIVES *NOT* THEIR POCKETBOOK
and by then, of course, it's too late
mod me troll/flamebait, at least i'm not afraid to express my opinion and snipe anonymously from behind my mod points
it
those fuckers still owe me $400 and have a collection agency after *me*
they used to be called cellular one and they were just as shady then
cell phone providers are modern snake oil salesmen with legal protection
In Australia the charging system is much the same as Europe - the caller pays whether they send SMS or make a call, same principle as the land-line. Why anyone would sign up for a phone system where it costs to receive is beyond me, are all U.S. schemes like this?
As a consequence of this caller pays approach, I've never received a single SMS spam message, it would costs the spammer too much - I only receive notifications from the voicemail system and messages from friends; even sending via web sites is charged to the sender (via whatever mechanism the site chooses).
If you're being charged to receive, change your carrier.
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
I do not know about other countries, so maybe my post is useless. And my english is terrible ;-)
...) : it would be a bit like you could receive bills from a shop for something another person bought.
;-)
;-)
In Belgium, there are only a few main operators : Proximus, Mobistar and Base. Like that things are easy to control.
There are a few main pricing schemes : pre-paid cards and subscriptions. Pre-paid cards are more expensive per call and per sms but does not cost an extra monthly subscription - therefore they are ideal for very small customers.
And there are a few phone number types : normal and high-price. You can easily make the difference between them by how they start and by their length (length 11 are usually expensive). You could use a high-price number as a payment method, because when you own a high-price number you receive some money everytime somebody phones to you. Examples : chat, meetings, logos, secret codes to get something on Internet - instead of using a credit card payment system.
As far as I know, the receiver of a call or of a sms never pays for it if he / she is in Belgium. It is always the sender who should pay. But if the receiver is outside Belgium he will have to pay the international part of the call. It always makes me surprised when I hear it is not like that in other places (US, Russia,
Typical prices for call are between 10 and 50 cent / minute. Typical prices for sms are between 10 and 25 cent / sms. So if you want to send spam to the zillion of Belgian people it's going to cost you something
However something that happened a lot here was : people started to receive sms from a company, telling "someone thinks of you and wants a date with you : surf to www.com to discover who he/she is". They went to this website and they were told that a shy person is in love with them and wants to go out with them. If only you would discover his/her first name - because he/she is so shy and he/she does not want yo go out with you if you do not see who he/she is. Send your guesses to a high-price number. Obviously each time you would send a sms to this high-price number you would be answered : "nice try, but it is not the good answer - try again". Some people like me tried with every woman name they know
Obviously each time I tried a guess the company behind it received a few cents. They were hundred of people to try. And the most funny was nobody wanted to go out with them. At least, nobody told this company he/she wanted to go out with them...
Do somebody knows other examples?
. . . and they said they could "block the number."
Seriously, when I found out that text messaging quickly added up on the cell phone bill (or, rather, my parents did), I made sure to ask Verizon about this the next time I took my phone in to get it fixed. They were of absolutely no help at all and just said that the numbers could be blocked. Otherwise, there is NO way for me to prevent incoming messages, at the cost of $0.10 per (unsolicited) message.
I haven't gotten a single spam text message yet (I've hardly gotten any messages at all), but I'm just going to be even more pissed off when I do. I hate my phone, I hate my provider, and I hate spam. I'm just happy that I anticipated this problem before it hits full-force.
There is a simple solution to stop spammers: put a bounty on them. Hell, I'd gladly put a good $100k on a spammer's head. If we all put bounties on spammers, spamming would be eliminated. Wha-la!
Here in Sweden it's the same, but usually the high usage plans are only available to companies...
Well, there is a very simple reason why SMS cost so much more than voice calls: they do not consume the same resources. The network resource used for SMS in the GSM network is the control channel, whilst voice calls use the data channel. The available bitrate in these channels are nowhere near the same.
Clearly the operators should be able to charge based on the costs incurred. Now, this is no argument supporting the prices we see today. The actual cost of sending an SMS plus a reasonable profit should dictate a price about half of the current cost in Europe.
Fair enough...
I'm on o2 in the UK (www.o2.co.uk) and pay ZERO per SMS to receive, and ZERO per SMS to send.
For £20 a month, I get 500 Minutes to landlines (local and national), 50 minutes to other mobile networks, 500 SMS - oh, and a brand new colour phone with camera built in - I'd say that's good value (take £5/month off if you don't want the phone)
I lived in the states a while back and - at that time at least - mobile or cell phones used the same area code prefix as a land line in the area. Which meant that people were not aware they were ringing a more expensive phone therefore they could not be charged more therefore the owner was charged. In most other countries there are per operator prefixes. Here in Ireland we have, 3 networks Vodafone (087), O2 (086) and Meteor (085). I don't know why the US did not use this system.
cL0h
I've had a mobile for almost 10 years and haven't had a single piece of spam on it.
incoming anything was meant to include actual phone calls, not just SMS. When you receive a call on your home phone, you don't pay for it, but if you receive one at your cell you do.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Well, either we pay to get SMS messages, or we pay to send them, correct? (Can't have free SMS, we'd use it like an Instant Messenger client) If you are charged, instead, to send them (which you are from your phone) then the current system of messages e-mailed to your phone and delievered to your phone from the phone company's web site (for free) would have to stop. I'd rather keep that free (instead of having to buy credits or use your debit card for sending a .10 $ message).
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
What about following: after floods that happened three years in a row in Czech, someone came up with the idea of sending SMS to each phone in cells covering the area in danger with a warning. Would you like to receive that?
> SMS to each phone in cells covering the area in danger with a warning. Would you like to receive that?
If I had to pay for it? No. Seriously, the people who live in Flood zones, and have for years, know that if it's raining a lot it might be a good idea to get the hell out. That kind of stuff makes me wonder about people who live in the Mississippi River flood area, or in Tornado Alley (US Midwest). *Surpise*, there's a flood/tornado there. MANY TIMES A YEAR, yet these idiots still live there and act surprised when it happens. Now this is fine, they may be masochists, that's their deal, but when they ask for shitloads of Federal relief money... why should my money go to someone who's too fucking stupid to move. And it's not that they don't have the money -- they have to rebuild/remodel their houses every year because of it!
Therefore, uh... in conclusion, er... SMS R dum! Yeah, that's a good argument, eh?
This is a half-truth at best. My guess is that an SMS message probably sends a few kilobits in the control channel. A voice call probably sends a few kilobits in the control channel and then many many megabits of data in the data chanel.
The fact is that SMS doesn't generate much traffic at all. And voice calls still require some interaction in the control channels. At least that is my understanding of how things work.
Why do you think your wireless provider sends you 10 ads a month touting SMS service? (At least mine does!) Simple - they make almost pure profit on it. The biggest problem wireless providers have is putting up towers all over the place to keep calls from being dropped as the network gets saturated. SMS is a service which uses very little bandwidth and which also lets the cell providers delay delivery (within reason). If there is a burst of traffic on the destination tower they can just hold the SMS message for 10-30 seconds before sending it during a lull. Voice traffic is always realtime and uses a ton of bandwidth.
On my current call plan, to send an SMS message to my fiance would cost me about 12 cents total (10 to send, 2 for her to receive). On the other hand, to pick up the phone and make a one minute call would cost me nothing due to the fact that we don't use all the minutes in our calling plan (which is the case with 99% of cell phone owners most likely). The cell provider should be enticing me to do the former, but of course I do the latter since it is cheaper...
My boss has the cell phone plan where he can get all the phone calls he likes for one flat fee and pays for all outgoing calls ( with so many free minuts )
I attempted to get the handspring visor phone add on module but handspring ran out.
The service "I" ordered was free nights and weekends. Thats incomming and outgoing. Outside of nights and weekends I just don't need a cell phone.
I've noticed the cell phone rates for SMS, email and web surfing is stupidly overpriced and not worth it no matter what US calling plan I go with so I left it out.
As it is I got a wireless modem for my pda instead and have AIM, email and web browsing with zero limits cheap. No phone but I can live with that.
I don't actually exist.