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."

Comments

Pricing for receive: a North American problem?

[chathamhouse]

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.

Re:Huh? You have to pay *extra* for SMS?

[womby]

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