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?

Re:Hmm.

[sheetsda]

Source - Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991

From Subpart L - Restrictions on Telephone Solicitation

L. No person may

a. Initiate any telephone call (other than a call made for emergency purposes or made with the prior express consent of the called party) using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice,

i. To any emergency telephone line, including any 911 line and any emergency line of a hospital, medical physician or service office, health care facility, poison control center, or fire protection or law enforcement agency;
ii. To the telephone line of any guest room or patient room of a hospital, health care facility, elderly home, or similar establishment; or
iii. 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;

(Emphasis mine) This appears to be the law that made calling cell phones illegal, but it seems it is specific to "telephone calls". I would think a good lawyer could argue that they're essentially the same thing though.

the worst

[Anonymous Coward]

And just when you thought butchering the English language couldn't get any worst...

Re:the worst

[Epistax]

Starting a sentence with and, then not finish the sentence (fragment) and using "worst" instead of worse.. Yes, you are right. I didn't think it could get any worse than that.

FCC regulations

[pvt_medic]

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).

Re:FCC regulations

[justforaday]

(Also it is illegal for a telemarketer to call a cell phone, because of the charge ensued from having to use minutes).

Not entirely true. It is illegal for a telemarketer to use an autodialer to initiate the phone call, but it is not illegal for a telemarketer to call your cell phone if they hand dialed the number. See this post earlier in the thread for the section of the TCPA that states this. I only know this because I was debating taking the Washington Times to small claims court for calling my cell phone to get me to subscribe (the person on the other end didn't know what my number was to remove it from their list because "the machine dials the numbers for us").

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.

Re:The major problem with SMS spam...

[KC7GR]

Ketamine-bp wrote...

"(3) They know where you read it... the positioning system of the GPS/w-cdma networks allow them to track your place..."

Not true in all cases, nor at all times. All the GPS-enabled phones I've seen to date do not automatically broadcast one's position. They do so only when you're making or receiving an actual call. Also, the network itself has to be able to interpret and pass on the GPS data received. If you're hitched into a 'legacy' analog network, or a digital one that has not been updated to handle the e-911 feature set, your phone can spew its position data all it wants to no avail.

I'm not sure how it is for phones other than Motorola and Nokia, but the ones I've seen let you configure the GPS function to transmit position only for 911 calls or for all calls.

Here's the problem: The phones I've played with all come with the locator feature set to "Transmit on all calls" by default, and it takes some digging in the menu tree to find the feature and change it. Hardly anyone actually reads the manual for electronic equipment, let alone digs into the deep menus to play with low-level functions.

Even worse, you can't turn the GPS functionality off altogether because the FCC made its presence mandatory for the new E-911 systems.

This is a big problem in Japan

[foidulus]

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...

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.

In the UK...

[electrichamster]

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 ;)

Re:In the UK...

[Zocalo]

So have I, so I forwarded a couple of the messages to ICSTIS and they stopped practically overnight. Best of all, as this article shows, ICSTIS has teeth and isn't afraid to bite and name names afterward. Note that in additional to the UKP 75,000 fines, all six companies were banned from operating in the UK. Combine that with this upcoming operating guideline and hopefully SMS spam in the UK might not even get off the ground.

You know what this means!

[SushiFugu]

Fast forward a year or so from now: "Ask Slashdot: Where Do Dummy Cell Phone Numbers Go?"

Damn info harvesters

[obli]

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!

shocked and confused

[gerardrj]

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?

What I do

[AnimeFreak]

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.

Been there before with Verizon...

[ChilyWily]

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.