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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?"
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
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!