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Spammers Start Abusing Cell Phones
slimyrubber writes "Just when you thought that spam couldnt get any worst, Cell phones are becoming the latest target of electronic junk mail, with a growing number of marketers using text messages to target subscribers. Is cell-phone spam likely to evolve into something that big, something approaching the scale of e-mail spam? Not if you help to kill SMS spam where it starts. Hopefully."
I seem to recall that in the US, telemarketing to cellular phones was illegal, as the receiver often pays for it directly.
Wouldn't sms spam fall into the same category?
This isn't new at all. I remember clearly getting phone spam back in 2001, and it wasn't for things I'd subscribed to via text messaging (I rarely used the phone, and certainly not for any of these fucking "TXT 4 KEWL LOGOS" services).
And just when you thought butchering the English language couldn't get any worst...
I think that we will quickly see law suits being filed over this, similar to the one we saw to fax.com. Many cellular companies charge for receiving text messages, and it would be a violation of FCC regulations to initiate such ads when the recipiant is being charged for them. (Also it is illegal for a telemarketer to call a cell phone, because of the charge ensued from having to use minutes).
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
First Email, Then Phones.. Will next be my fridge?
Is that
(1) It is not easy to filter out, given the majority of people here now only uses phone that cannot be programmed easily (at least, not as easy as using the OE plugins or the MacosX Mail.app)
(2) Usually they are more intrusive - nowadays people carry cell phones around and when you are bugged by SMS spam TOGETHER with important SMS.. it's friggin' bad...
(3) They know where you read it... the positioning system of the GPS/w-cdma networks allow them to track your place...
now what? right - do it with legislation.
I was there last year, and the day after I got my cell phone, before I had even given the number out to anyone, I managed to get SMS spam. Porn spam to boot. Needless to say I was both impressed and annoyed.
The cell phone structure in Japan though makes it a bit easier to spam(the carrier I had, KDDI uses your cell # to do SMS). Unlike the US where your cell # area code is based on location, in Japan all cell phones have either 090, 080(and 081 I think) so the spammers just used an SMS equivalent of an autodialer I do believe. Though I never got any SMTP spam while I had the phone...
For one thing - SMS are limited to 160 characters, and secondly - SMS cost money to send. Granted - even email costs money, but you could send probably several thousand emails of a few kb each for less than US$1. With SMS you're paying a few cents for each individual SMS of max 160chars. Therefore for SMS spam to become a real phenomenon, you would need way higher returns for the messages you send.
At least the messages are limited to 110 characters on my old Nokia / attwireless setup.
We already went though fax spam, email spam, telemarketers and of course everyone's favorite - junk in your snail mail box.
I think its time that we come up with a more global view of things. A single list similar to the do-not-call list but that will allow you to get blacklisted for every kind of communications. I know many people have reservations like that spammers will use these lists as a source of valid email addresses, but you can get around that by allowing the user to select which one of their contacts they want on there...
Peter.
Companies won't stop cell phone abuse because it means higher dollars for them. Plus it means they can sell services to block the abuse, which is generally a pattern from regular phone companies selling caller-id, call blocking... etc.
Wherever there's money, there's abuse of power.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
In the UK I've been recieving text message spam for a while, and recently there has been a massive surge in the number of text message "Scams" being sent out.
;)
Generally of the type "You have a new voicemail, call XXX to listen to it", where XXX is a premium rate number.
Highly, highly irritating - now all we need is a baysian text message filter
hopfully this will help outrage the average joe finally. Phone spam annoyed people but usually didn't cost them anything and it provoked some good 'ol fasioned outrage and finally got legal attention. Email spam is pretty much the same thing. But this WILL cost the average joe so hopfully we'll see some immedate action rather than the slow "lets live with it..oh wait its annoying..oh shit fuck this" mentality. I really cannot understand why unsolicited advertising isn't illegal already.
here in the uk we've been getting spam through our mobiles for a long time now, many years.
there has also been chainmail too.
I had this problem for about 2-3 years. I finally got them to turn the stupid message thing off on my phone after arguing over the bill every month. Is it getting worse or did someone just now notice? Wondering why this is news.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Fast forward a year or so from now: "Ask Slashdot: Where Do Dummy Cell Phone Numbers Go?"
Since people are having such a hard time locating the origin of the spams/spammers, why not take legal action against those company that endorses spam (ie. those company that advertise through spam).
All the more reason NOT to have a cell phone
They are repeating this.. Just like a religion. I mean the first time when they started to claim that mobiles are going to be spammed. What's up with that? Time to upgrade our SMS capable phones to UMTS capable so the porn ads and local supermarkets can legally send us legal ads? Time to upgrade so that we feel necessary to buy McAfee Spamkiller v5000 or something?
And this happended just when I thought my wursts couldn't get any more spam...
What is the sound of one hand clapping?
cat
- White Knight of the Order of Mihoshi Enthusiasts
I get the impression that most Senators and people at that level have other people read their email, and that they don't always feel the impact of spam the way the rest of us do. But their messing with their cell phones has got to be a completely different matter. So the upside might be that this actually gets their attention. The downside - I am not sure if I trust the government to develop legislation that does not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Spam remind me the last movie of the Matrix series... specifically the Agent Smith... Spam is getting in everything and looks like nobody can stop it... do we need a Neo for this???
So why can't they implement a similar function for SMS? If the number's not in my phone book, I don't want to hear a tone, and I don't want the message sitting on my phone - just flush it straight away.
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
The only way you'll see cell companies scrambling to prevent SMS spam is if their revenues would be adversely affected by not doing so. If cell companies learn that their subscribers are turning their cellphones off when not in use or are cancelling their SMS service altogether, then they they sit up and take notice. Otherwise SMS spam delivery actually helps their bottom line and they won't be inclined to prevent it.
I've been pestered ocassionally with SMS spam, but I had no idea how and where those foghats got my number from. Then recently, maybe two days ago, I discovered a site that could do reverse lookup on numbers in my country, It found me from my number, in a goddamn public list, I checked a few more similiar sites and about half of them knew about me. It appears that my WSP sold the numbers of anyone they had connected with a name, out there on the internet they're defenseless against them evil info harvesters. Sellouts... Death to Vodafone!
I predict this will never catch on. At least not in Europe. Here the sender pays for sent text-messages, which makes the spammer pay big money if he is to spread the word. In adidtion, it is very easy to trace messages wntering the phone-network, and thus it is very easy to catch the offenders.
Each of the major cell phone providers have an e-mail to SMS gateway relaying all messages to [10-digit-number]@[provider's domain] to the appropriate cell phone of it exists on their network.
.001ish% response rate to justify their operations... so any tool this strong is dangerous in the hands of "guess and check" operations.
Not only does that mean that there's only 10 billion possible combinations that can go in that 10-digit-number slot, since all those numbers come in the form [area code]-[exchange]-[4 digits] they can start focusing on the exchanges that have been allocated to wireless providers to get a very high success rate. If you know that 508-335-xxxx belongs to Cingular, you can take a pretty good shot at aiming 10,000 messages at all the combinations of that number on Cingular's SMS domain, and a majority of them will most likely hit devices.
Of course, number portablity now introduces the possiblity that a number is now no longer with the original provider who owned the exchange allocation, but that'd be only a dent in a pretty high success rate to begin with. Remember that spammers need only a
I remember the old Prodigy service had the limited domain of addresses in the form of [four letters][two digits][letter from a-f]@prodigy.com and spammers had a field day of being able to discover such addresses from them being posted on the service and just deducing others.
I don't have a mobile myself so, concider me un-educated. But shouldn't there be some 'turn off SMS' option? That would make the most sence to me.
I wonder how long it will be before the first worms show up probagating via bluetooth interfaces, turning cellphones into bots sending out mass SMS spam...oh, wait a minute...Why only cell phones, why not as well printers or any other bluetooth device? Next thing you know, your printer starts printing all that pr0n spam!
who | grep -i blond | date cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; gasp; yes; uptime; umount; sleep
Anyone who has bought anything from a web site (or God forbid, simply asked a question by e-mail) knows what I'm talking about. Why would SMS legislation in the USA be any different? Corporate lobbyists want to protect 'legitimate' corporate spam.
Virtually all of the spam SMS-messages I get are from phone companies themselves.
My own 'provider' (Vodaphone) broadcasts the occasional multimedia message so I can see how unspeakably wonderful they are, but that is a relatively minor irritant.
Whenever I leave the country - Germany - the local providers all send me messages in German welcoming me to their networks and suggesting ways I can enhance my experience there by dialing certain numbers. You get one of these messages each week (Sunday to Saturday) so a weekend somewhere will generate one message when I get there and another one on Sunday for each network my phone happens to roam into. This is annoying enough when I am not at the wheel, but goes way beyond that when I am driving and expecting a serious message. No, I do not want to pull over and check my mobile every time some cretinous phone company wants me to check out their 'recipe of the week'.
Anything that allows me to whack them with a big stick is welcome by me.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
First the confusion: The article was written in November of 2003, 9 months ago. SMS has been available for at least 8 years (perhaps not under that name) so why does the article talk about "early adopters"?
Second, the shocked part:
I recently started receiving SMS spam on my Nextel phone. I've has SMS and standard email on the phone for at least 5 years and just recently started receiving junk messages on it. At least once a day I'd get some garbled text telling me to call some number in Seattle, WA to purchase a college degree.
The thing that shocked me was that Nextel does not indicate the source of the message on the phone that received it, You just get the text and the date/time stamp it was received.
I called customer service and technical support, both informed me that Nextel there is no way to track the source of such a message (this is blatantly false, they just don't bother to track it), and that there was no way to block such messages by sender. If I didn't want the messages I'd just have to turn off the service all together.
That simply isn't an option as SMS is one of the ways I monitor my systems; ie: all root logins from anyplace other than approved machines get sent to my phone; important client messages get through on SMS when I have my ringer off at night, etc.
In the end all they did was refund my monthly messaging fee.
I finally gave up, called the number that was listed in the messages and threatened criminal and/or civil action if I received any more messages on my cell phone from them.
I haven't received any more junk in the week since that call. In the end I guess I'm out the nickel it cost to call long distance for a minute.
I just can't understand how a company can charge you for incoming messages when they have no way for you to filter them or even know the source of the message. How could they not see anonymous on-way communication as a potential (likely) source of abuse?
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I'd like a phone that allows SMS only from people in my contacts...
luckily i do no use or need my cellphone much, so it is almost always turned off unless i go on an errand and need to talk while on the run, or if i am going out of town on a road trip (for emergencys)
I have received SMS spam, but unlike email, it costs the sender money, thereby limiting the scale of the abuse.
The scam that has been turned up recently over here in the UK has been targetting schoolchildren. You get an SMS saying that someone fancies you, or something like that. You reply, and get hit for a 1.50 ($3) charge. However, the regulations were recently changed to prevent this kind of thing - IIRC, you're not allowed to send an SMS that doesn't explicitly state if the reply is going to cost more than normal.
SMS, to me is a pain in the ass no matter who the message is from, if I want to do text I would buy a blackberry, I have a cell phonr to...um, I dunno...TALK.
DEATH TO SMS
I am getting spam to my mobile phone for, say 3 years. Now it is ok because my phone was stolen, so I have new a fresh number. I live in EU, Czechia. Enjoy, whoever is using that spammy number now!
SHE does throw dice.
The most frequent problem with spam I've gotten using 2 carriers (Sprint and KDDI [au]) was with the damn shortmail function. I had the service shortly (pun?) with Sprint, dropping it after the free trial ended. However I still frequently receive spam over that service, which clearly has a different address than the regular phone e-mail address. I could understand that the KDDI plan had spammers, as the service was free with the phone plan unlike Sprint, but I'm more concerned if Sprint factors in a charge for handling spam, as in if they charge the receiver extra for the data transmission in their phone bill. Maybe nothing more than a penny per datagram, but still, I'm sure they're making their cut to handle the spam, especially for users that would get charged if they used the service to delete the offending shortmail and weren't subscribers, as the phone still has the capability for these functions. Kind of a double edged sword for the customer. Get charged for the subscription service and receive spam, or get charged for spam without the subscription.
-Yim
A lot of people are paying for SMS service. Paying. Some people pay for email as well, but not by the message, and the postal mail is in our taxes... but again we don't pay for each delivered message.
But with many SMS providers do they not have a certain fee for a certain number of messages? In effect these spam messages would then be eating in to the allotted # of SMS use you paid for. I don't like that.
I don't know the laws, and I don't care to really because if they don't protect you from this (just referring to the US right now), then I don't want to hear about the laws.
Thank god i haven't received any spam shit yet.
Presently here, but not there.
I've had 2 spam text messages this year. One from Orange (bastards). I got 3 last year, so not a massive problem.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
That's funny, because whenever I send my cousin an SMS from icq, I don't get charged for it.
In order to text message me on my cell phone, you must include my nickname enclosed in brackets -- ie: (AnimeFreak). That way spammers have a harder time spamming me.
My GSM/GPRS provider included it in their service, so I made use of it.
Yup, after about 1.5 years of no spam, suddenly, I started to receive SMS messages in spanish! I called Verizon and told them that since they were just a dozen or so junk messages, I was igonring them, but that they should remove the 10cent per message charge from my bill.
The Verizon droid told me that she would 'enhance' my service to a $2.99 per month charge where I would be able to receive 'unlimited' SMS messages!
To make a long story short, I got those charges removed but decided to remove the SMS option from the cellphone because there is no winning when the cellphone company colludes with the spammers.
It's very easy to send SMS without paying for it. Try ICQ as a start.
I doubt spamming on cell phones is every gonna become a big problam like regular spam. For the simple reason that with most cell phone providers, it costs money to receive an SMS or MMS message. SPAM is still around cause in the end, the only cost to the receiver is time and just a painful experience. Paying to receive spam is so outrageous that carriers will take the necessary steps to put an end to it, at the risk of loosing their customers.
im glad that at&t wireless dosent charge for incoming just outgoing
Mike
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Per annecdote, in the six years that I've owned a cell phone I have received maybe three or four SMS advertisements (excluding, at the start, opt-out 'promotions' from my provider). I replied once and got an error telling me the number was non-existant; exactly what I was testing for.
...first of all, it adds an extra word that has to be put in the already limited SMS message (160 chars).
/.)/
Secondly, does the average teen using SMS want to remember a password for every single person they send SMS messages to?
Thirdly unless you made it a "proper" "secure" password (which would be a bitch to enter with predictive text) it is vulnerable to a simple dictionary based attack.
Now all we need is a huge list for "why your SMS spam prevention technique will not work" (a la smtp one that's always popping up on
I am NaN
Anonymous e-mail to SMS gateways are just inviting abuse. Make people register for an account to use such things. The account can be free, but with verified contact info. And let SMS recepient charger sender $1 if he/she doesn't like the message.
email is email is email. It doesn't matter what kind of device (computer or cell phone) you use to download it, email is email is email. And, spam has been around for a while. This is nothing new.
Incoming text messages are already free on AT&T.
Now if only their data rates weren't so bad.
I work for a company that's actually produced a product to block mobile spam at the carrier. We've got a system in production already, and the volumes of block spam influx are horrifying. Beyond all conventional wisdom (the wisdom that says providers will turn a blind eye to reap profits), some providers are actually beginning to contact us about the product, so there might be some small hope.
You were unlucky --- perhaps you weren't using a standard network? The GSM Standard specifies 160 characters if using a Latin alphabet, or 70 if you use non-Latin alphabets like Arabic or Chinese.
Furthermore, many places and phones (e.g. pretty much everyone in the UK) now support multipart SMS, where the sender splits up a long message (320 chars or more) into multiple parts, and the receiver puts it back together at the receiving end.
Sorry.
"That's the only way to be sure" that spammers never spam again...
What makes you think FCC regulations will stop spammers now? There are so many things peddled by spammers that are illegal in MOST COUNTRIES, but being illegal never stopped them before.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Being late into the cell-phone game, I got my first cell-phone only 2 years ago. I was a Samsung phone/PalmPilot combo, just a few months before the TREO came out.
At any rate, I have received 2 spam SMS mesaages. (I use Sprint) Seeing I have never sent an SMS message in my life, I had no idea how someone got my SMS name.
Before we start running amok with rage, perhaps there should be some Spam-cell research.
Hate to nitpick but for the record those, (), are partenthesis. These, [], are brackets.
My provider is the guilty party here. I have AT&T Wireless as my mobile provider, and they are constantly spamming my phone with ads for the mMode service. For a while, I was receiving an ad every day at noon, urging me to subscribe to a monthly mMode plan. They backed off a little bit, but I can count on at least one SMS each month for a contest, promotion, or some other advertisement. I don't get charged for incoming text messages, but it is still an annoyance.
Just last week I received an automated telephone solicitation from AT&T Wireless to add international calling to my cell. It was on my home phone line, not my cell, but that still doesn't excuse it.
I'm not sure what AT&T Wireless is trying to do. They've been bleeding customers at a phenomenal rate over the last year. Perhaps they are trying to make their new owners (Cingular) look good?
I didn't see this probably because you are all l1nux newbs... but AOL IM has been able to send free SMS to any carrier for a long time now.
All it takes is +1(area code)(phone #)... anyone can do it, and with so many AOL IM spam accounts already... eh.
I don't live in the States anymore, so it is hard for me to speak from first hand experience as to what its current SMS state is - but in 1999 and 2000 I could send an e-mail to "phonenumber@phoneprovider.gateway.com" and it would see if that user had SMS capabilities on their service and if so would send it out to them.
I used it to send myself automated reminders and data via my computer - I also used it to harass my friends via e-mail.
Do these things still exist? - I forget the servers that were used, but it was something along the lines of "messaging.sprintpcs.com" or something, and then the phone number before the @.
If they do still exist, then it is just a matter of sending out your spam to every number in that range. Since you know fixed area codes of sorts (not entirely valid on cell phones, but there is still the concept that not every number is used), it limits the number space that you would have to move through.
For instance you know that "0000000000@whatever) is not valid, but "617###0045@whatever" is much more likely to be valid, assuming "###" is a proper series used by the provider in question.
(I can't used fixed examples since I am not as familiar with them now as I once was)
Even if they turned off the open side of it (meaning any e-mail sent to that), there is still the web access side - there was a web interface that would let subscribers send data via a web page to any enabled phone number - even on other platforms.
If you do a search, there are Perl modules and such out there to automate this as well.
You can even do it via AIM/iChat.
I have talked about it to some extent on my spam blog in the past - but I don't want to talk too in depth about it and then make it that much easier for someone that may have not had that idea before.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
After reading this thread I see a lot of people saying how annoying SMS spam is beacuse you get charged for them even if you don't want them. To everyone that has such a service I have to say are you out of your mind?
A service, setup such that as long as your cell phone is on and has service, that can bill you at will seems like the biggest wet dream a phone company could have since they forced leased phones! What incentive at all would they have not to sell the lists of their subscribers to anyone and everyone who wanted them?
I'm sorry, SMS may be neat but when I first got the sales pitch about including it in my service I laughed right in that poor salespersons face. I said if they ever come up with a way that I can deny any SMS message based on who the sender is then I might consider it but until then thanks but no thanks. (She then made a valent pitch about the unlimited service but I think she even knew that it was allready a lost cause.)
Vote with your dollars people. Don't use SMS at all until they make it more intelligent. If I can see who is messaging me I can choose to be charged or not. And if someone fools me and I accept one that I really didn't want, well thems the breaks but it was still my option.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
If I start getting SMS spam on a regular basis (I've gotten only like 2 over the last 7 years), I swear to god that I will have no problem tracking the bastards down and either paying someone to rough them up, or just doing it myself.
Vandalism is not out of the question either. You think I'm kidding? I'm sure many of you feel the same way.
My i500 would ring with spam messages at random times of the day or night. While they gave me 32 choices of ringtone to assign to an incoming SMS message, none of them were "the sound of silence".
Writing them asking for a "silent" ringtone was futile. Since they want to make money selling you these, it is not easy to create your own.
Eventually I stumbled across a web page that let me set up a filter restricting incoming SMS messages to those on a whitelist.
Here are two inventions I hearby grant to the public domain:
1) How about a button on a mobile phone that disables the ring for a fixed period of time? I go into the meeting and press "shut up for a hour". When the hour is up, the ring comes back on.
2) As a related concept, how about a button that says "stay off until I wander back outside". (The phone would determine that you were back outside by noticing the profound increase in signal strength).
-- Jamie Faye
I'm not sure, but I think it migbt cost a lot to send a text message to a cell phone in the US from South Korea.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
In the USA where the receiver pays in many cases for SMS and there open e-mail to SMS gateways still exist, Sprint are having to block up to 3 million messages a day, up from 6 million in a peak month in 2003. -- Source: Mike Grenville (www.openwave.com)
Paper title: Market structure in mobile telecoms: qualified indirect access and the receiver pays principle -- Source: Chris Doyle, Jennifer C. Smith (London Business School, Sussex Place, London / Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Warwick, UK)
I could even cite refrences to people in this thread that have a service where it is the receiver who pays but I think I've made my point.
I'm glad that your service is more intelligent than this assbackwards Receiver Pay's model but your missing the whole point of my post. If they are useing a Reciver Pay's model they need to allow some sort of intelligent options for receiver. (Or impliment what you have.)
Also, I'm really glad you enjoy your SMS but you should tone the fanboy down just a notch. You come across almost as phone co shill.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Slightly offtopic but does anyone have a Treo 300 and use sprint for their provider?
Does it strip caller ID from your SMS messages?
I called Sprint about this and they claim that it's to stop spam, unfortunately now when I get text messages there is no identification data and I can't respond.
I'm curious what answers you've received from sprint about this problem.
(i'm reposting this because I was accidently not logged in when I posted the first.)
Slightly offtopic but does anyone have a Treo 300 and use sprint for their provider?
Does it strip caller ID from your SMS messages?
I called Sprint about this and they claim that it's to stop spam, unfortunately now when I get text messages there is no identification data and I can't respond.
I'm curious what answers you've received from sprint about this problem.
Nothing seen so far will deter spammers. You can make it a crime punishable by death, and they'll still do it because there's very little chance they'll get caught.
There is always someone willing to host a spammer.
There are enough people with trojan'd windows machines to relay spam.
There are enough foreign countries that don't follow our laws.
The list goes on. Politicians and newspaper editors like to think that creating a law will get us somewhere. It won't! Wake up! You have to be able to enforce these laws. You have to be able to quickly trace and catch the spammer. Then, pull out a meat cleaver and chop off fingers and toes.
Creating black lists (especially for entire countries) just gets the bleeding heart liberals all wound up.
These same bleeding hearts want to create more laws. The old laws apparently weren't good enough... we need to waste more time and energy creating new ones.
They want to give the "developing countries" more time to sort out their technological problems. Excuses, excuses, excuses. Frankly, the whole process is tiresome.
We need better email infrastructure. Security, registration, authentication, etc. all have to be thought out and incorporated. The whole process needs to be tightened down.
No more fake addresses when registering. No more fake phone numbers.
You want to start an email server? You need to go down to the police station, register with a real ID, get a special piece of software that won't allow spoofed IPs. You connect and authenticate to a legal email gateway. If you send Spam, that's it. Someone is coming over to your house, arresting you, and confiscating the evidence. Get ready for jail.
Leave the old email system in place. Let the spammers have their fun there. No one will use it if Email2 is successful, and we'll see the death of spam. Just once, I'd love to meet a spammer in a dark alley with a 7 iron in my hands. Just once.
The world is full of serial killers. What we need is just one of these that targets only spammers.
After a few of them get sniped in front of their computers, others would think twice...
In addition to the good points already made:
* I don't want to type a password in every one of the several messages I send every day.
* I don't want to waste time reading it either
* Now and then I borrow messages.
It might be possible to automate and hide the first and second away (store the password with the number), but it still eats out of the length of the message and requires support from phone makers. (And it won't help those who keep their current phone)
The third requires me to remember passwords in addition to numbers. (Unless my phone is just out of money, and I can look it up.)
Strong no to this one. It makes what is currently as routine and basic as a phone call much more frustrating.
(It might work if I only sent and recieved a few messages a week. I don't, and I'm not even a heavy user.)
As I understand it, the open gateways are gone. SMS messages now all require a fee.
If that's true (or even if it's not but these guys aren't using some free gateway), that would mean they're paying per-message, the same as the rest of us.
I've always had my doubts about the claims that charging a per-email fee could be used to stop spam. (After all, the SPAMMERS are charging for the spam, aren't they?) It might make some impact - but would also hit legitimate users. Any setpoint for the fee would block some legitimate email messages and pass some spam. And since spam earns money I betcha if you cranked it up to where it stopped MOST legit email there'd still be lots of spam.
But if the spammers are paying per-message for SMS we've got the test case right here, don't we?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
... copy off of ICQ. My cell phone has a phone book in it. It's easy to add/remove people from it. Give me the ability to say "only accept messages from people in my phone book" and the cell phone SPAM issue is solved. WTF email doesn't work this way, I'll never know.
"Derp de derp."
LG's (or at least the LG VX-6000) come with it set to E-911 only.
I'll never have one of those annoying little noise machines (cell phone).
15 years ago if someone had a cell phone, you thought they were important. Today you know there on a leash to a higher power, like a wife.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
If spammers start messaging my phone, I'll just turn it off. If they want to interrupt my life like that, I don't need a phone. I'll call you. No thanks, I'll figure out another way to keep in touch with my friends.
And this reminds me about a funny political satire flash animation at albino black sheep, very on topic here I think: Taliban Takes on Telemarketers...
Don't like SMS, did the previous owner of your number subscribe to 1000 mailing lists? Call up your service provider and ask for the "message no terminate" feature. This feature is on ATTWS. What it does is block all SMS messages period.
It doesn't cost money to send sms messages to ATTWS users, so hence the importance of the feature. CDMA networks cost money to send to the user, so therefor SENDING MESSAGES TO VERIZON, SPRINT, TELUS, OR BELL CANADA IS NOT A GOOD IDEA.
make SMS and cellphone calls into a 100% "sender pays" system like we have here in australia, where recieving a call or SMS costs nothing for the reciever (only the sender would pay)
I understand that people who they might not have never seen anything like this before would understand would be ok.
That was not the tone that the OP was written in.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I have service thru AT&T Wireless and receive between 15 and 30 spam SMS messages a day. I opted out of text messaging, which means that I can't SEND text messages. I called and requested that it be turned off entirely. The tech informed me that I wouldn't receive any voice mail or other types of notification. I said, "Fine. Turn it off." I still get the same number of messages. The only other alternative offered to me was to change my number.
I find it a bit hard to believe that they can't filter outside traffic from the other internal notification messages. All the messages that I receive is email addressed to @wireless.att.net. How hard would it be to filter that out? Tech support claims that there isn't anything they can do.
I won't be renewing my contract. You can count on that.
for them to figure this out ...
Most Nextel phones can be directly emailed to using phone#@blahblahnextel.com. (i'm not about to publish the actual address)
Pretty easy to generate an email list of every single phone number.
The big nightmare is that Nextel charges the USER by the character for this service.
Yikes!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
... of any retail outlet of any company that sends intrusive advertising. This could nip in the bud any use of spam by otherwise-legitimate entities (businesses, churches, politicians...).
Tag lost or not installed.
Hi,
as SMS prices are very high where I live, I am usually safe from sms spam (except for o2, my provider, who has sent one or two experimental - I guess - messages).
But I have seen a different kind of abuse appear: sometimes I receive phone calls that are terminated the instant my phone starts to ring, so that there's an entry in the received calls list.
Of course, the number always is some kind of premium or foreign number in disguise. So, as many people simply return calls the instant they find an unknown number in their received calls list, these people made a lot of money. I think this kind of spam is far worse right now...
555-1212 or
(800) 936-5700
flinging poop since 1969
If SMS spam becomes as big as email spam, far more people will care and governments will be forced to do something serious about it. Hopefully, that's when there will be a real war on spam and we will get the laws and technology we need to stop it once and for all.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
in the middle of the night my sprint cellphone starts ringing since some spammer sent an email to me.
well, since I dont really use that function, I just turn the email alert off.
I have a Nextel phone. I opted not to pay for the ability to send and recieve text messages. 2 months in I get 2 message form Nextel advertising their add-on services, and I was charged a nickle a peice for them! Of course when I complaied they credit the charges and promised to put a block on the account so no text messages could be sent. They couldn't answer me why they had to block something that wasn't ever enabled in the first place.
Seems like a tricky revenue stream to me. How many thousands of people don't check their bill close enough to see that they are being scammed by the phone company? Outside spammers aside, the phone company IS the spammer, and profiting from it even if you don't buy the product!
- Disclaimer: Information in this post deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
With calls, you can choose not to answer and not get charged. No such option for text messages.
The fastest way to do this is to find out the cell # for some senators, and then send each of them a few million SMS messages.