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."

Comments

Hmm.

[mindstrm]

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?

The major problem with SMS spam...

[ketamine-bp]

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.

SMS is somewhat protected anyway, isn't it?

[beh]

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.

Re:SMS is somewhat protected anyway, isn't it?

[anakin357]

The problem is this, that most cell phone providers have an email gateway into their network, as a courtesy and convenience.

For example: 5555551212@provider.net

So what happens is the spammers use the same techniques of spamming regular email addresses but it's too easy to guess an email address with a number that is in a fixed format, a number that doesn't bounce usually incremented by 1 is a good place to goto next.

Companies

[mfh]

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.