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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."
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...
You pay to receive SMSs? That's messed up.
Get your own free personal location tracker
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.
.. 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
Title 47 does seem to provide for protection against SMS-style spam. The reason is that for it costs YOU money to receive the unsolicited ads.
'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;'
So I believe that if you wanted to, you would have grounds for a lawsuit under current law.
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
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)!
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
Incoming text messages are free with my plan with Rogers ATT in Canada. Outgoing are $0.05 per message. Interestingly enough, the only SMS spam I receive is from Rogers itself.
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
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.
No, you add $0.10 to the sender's phone bill. Just like they do across the whole of Europe and Asia. It isn't rocket science.
If you make the receiver pay and they get 200 spam SMS's per day how useful do you think the service will be? I can't see how it can possibly reduce the usefulness of the service if the sender pays.
I live in the UK, it costs 5-10p per SMS sent depending on the service plan and network and I don't get any SMS spam at all. But you know what? Every single mobile phone is SMS enabled which makes it ubiquitous, which makes it very useful.
When sending an SMS, I don't even think about the 5p cost, I mean, really...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I live in the beforementioned cold country as well, and have never received any SMS-spam during my ~5 years as a cellphone owner.
My operator, Radiolinja, has never sent me any "information message", either. I believe you have to send an sms to a special number to 'subscribe' to those messages.
It's currently not possible for a restaurant owner to target users within 100metres of his restaurant. However, it IS possible for a cellphone owner to send a message to another special number, with the command "find restaurant", in finnish, and the GSM system will pin-point your cellphone (no Gps!), cross reference it with a map, and send you a list of the nearest restaurants. I imagine it's just one step from getting a MMS reply with customized ads from the restaurants nearby...
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!
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?
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?
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...