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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
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.
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
.. 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
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
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)!
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 $0.01 USD).
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
ICSTIS, who regulate the premium rate telephone market - most of my SMS spams are shilling premium rate numbers, claiming that "I have won a prize" or that "someone likes me". ICSTIS have fined many spammers thousands of pounds.
There is also the Advertising Standards Authority who are now accepting complaints.
It is also illegal to use an automated dialler, but the bunch of lazy jobsworths at the Data Protection Agency can't be bothered to prosecute.
It used to be you could get 200 day time minutes, 400 first-incoming minutes, unlimited evenings and weekends, and also have roaming, etc -- with evenings starting at 6 pm -- for about 35$ 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.
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
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...
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!
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
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?
Uh, yeah, because moving around teeny little text files is a task that requires absurd investment in infrastructure.
It's data. It's digital data. If it's a text message or one millisecond of voice, it's freakin' data.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
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.
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?
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!