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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."
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Yea, I pay $42 for 500 weekday daytime minutes, *unlimited* night (after 9 I believe, when I make most of my calls anyway) and weekend minutes, *all* including national long distance. And oh, I don't pay roaming anywhere my cell phone company has service, which is basically any metro area in the US.
Man, that's really fucked up isn't it? I'd much rather pay $0.50/min on every call I place like I used to when I used a cell phone in Europe a few years back.
-bm
OK; the US phone system is completely fucked up.
In England, you pay to send, not to recieve. At 5p a time, spamming is not economic. I have never recieved a spam sms.
Now, in Houston, if my girlfriend dumped me, I could amuse myself for hours sending her 100s of SMSs, and racking up a great big for her. Wheeeeeee!
--- My dad's political betting
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.
You can usually call your cell phone provider and request they disable SMS on your account. I find SMS incredibly useful, but there is an option to disable it if you don't agree. :)
ok well try this
I pay nothing monthly (orange.co.uk or virgin.co.uk)
I pay nothing for incoming calls
I pay nothing to receve SMS messages
I pay 5p (aprox 7c per minute) for the first 2 minutes of calls made each day
I pay 2p (aprox 3c per minute) for all other minutes
to spend $42 per month I would have to use the phone every day and make over 1440 minutes of calls
just because you were too stupid to find a call plan that was sensible in europe doesnt mean nobody else can
**** lying is wrong even for sleeping dogs
On my Nokias I can turn off the ring tone for SMS independently of the normal voice tone. If you're not interested in SMS, just do this - after a while when your phone's memory fills with SMS messages it'll just refuse to accept any more.
Personally I couldn't be without SMS though. Much more efficient than voice a lot of the time.
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
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...
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.
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
Everyone does realize that turning the mobile phone off _doesn't_ stop you from getting the sms-spam? At least in here (Finland, home of Nokia wellies) the sms-servers keep the messages in storage for quite some time if they cannot be delivered to the recipient.
Christmas and new years eve can be exceptions to that rule, though. For some reason people tend to send a lot of sms-messages at those times, sometimes even clogging the service.
(And my last phonebill was about ~30e, for the last six months. The easiest way to keep your phonebill in manageable amounts: don't call just for fun.)
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.
The US is the only country that I know of that has "national" long distance rates for mobile phones. Most other countries have a set mobile rate to anywhere in the country. The only long distance rates that are on top of the mobile rates are Overseas calls.
For example in Australia, there is no "national" mobile rate. You pay the same regardless of whether they are standing beside you, or if they are on the other side of the country. In many cases people have started using included minutes (Many plans over here have a monthly fee that prepays calls up to the amount of the monthly fee, eg $30 month with $30 included calls) to call people interstate, because depending on time of day/plan etc, it can sometimes be cheaper to call via the mobile than by a land line.
So in answer to your question, yes "national" long distance is included by virtue of not existing.
Most people in the US just don't know how to shop around. I have unlimited anytime minutes, unlimited SMS (text messaging), and unlimited WAP just about anywhere in the state of Maryland. All this for around $70.00. I also don't get charged for long-distance unless I'm outside my home-coverage area.
r vices/specials.html
I could be on my phone 24 hours a day for the whole month and I get the same bill as I would if the phone was turned off.
The plans are out there... they are called "Unlimited Local Plans"
https://secure.gottagetone.com/zone44/products_se
Anyhow, how much do you pay for 1.5 Megabit Broadband Internet in the UK?
Telstra has a dial-up gateway to send SMS messages - you dial a number and get greeted with a little text menu that prompts you through the process of sending a SMS message. You get charged 10c or so for each message you send and you can (i think) send 4 messages at a time before needing to redial it.
;-) countries have peering arrangements with other telco's for SMS messaging, same as for normal phone connections.
There's also a "bulk" version of the above with start and end codes etc, you can send an unlimited number of messages in one go, but you need software to do so. There's quite a few SMS messengers for PC's and modems around the place.
As everyone else has said - get the sender to pay, or don't let them send messages. Easy as that. Most civilised
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Not everyone has said that. I don't see any problem with SMS spam. Even if there are peering arrangements it's still not as bad as email as far as anonymity. If a peer starts forwarding lots of SMS spam to your users then you tell the peer to pay up or you drop the peering arrangement. The fact that you could force people to pay for sending SMS messages is exactly the reason that you don't have to. If you can get them to pay to send SMS messages, why not only make them pay if they send SMS spam, and make them pay dearly?
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?