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First Lawsuit Against Cell-Phone Spammers
BMcWilliams writes "The PR machine at Verizon Wireless hasn't made any noise about this yet, but the carrier last month filed a lawsuit against some Rhode Island spammers who targeted its cell phone customers with over four million text-message ads for ephedra, penis pills, mortgages, etc. The timing of the lawsuit is interesting, given that the FCC is in the process of hammering out rules governing cell-phone spam. I am told the Verizon litigation is the first of its kind in the USA. My story about the lawsuit, and a copy of Verizon Wireless' complaint, are available here."
In addition to their anti-spam efforts Verizon has opposed the cell-phone directory--and in the broadband-whore department, are at the forefront of deploying FTTP--which I personally want today.
I'm not a huge fan of VZW--although they do have great coverage, at least IMBY.
Sigs cause cancer.
Most of the readers at hackingthemainframe.com don't have cell phones!
Get ur p.enis ppills deliverd strait 2 ur phone! forget vIa.gra!
So when do you get my 0.50 cent coupon for a Big Mac when I walk by a McDonalds?
:(
Big Brother, where art thou?
>>the FCC is in the process of hammering out rules governing cell-phone spam
Why is this taking so long? There should be two rules:
1) don't spam
2) reread rule #1
Failure to obey rule 1 results in summary execution by lethal injection.
Failure to obey rule 2 results in execution by being forced to go to a Britney Spears concert.
are lawsuits cool now?
I don't have a cell phone (yup, there actually ARE people without 'em) but I think there should be a way to get credit for the minutes that Spam costs a receiving cell.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
spammers will simply call you from offshore countries using VOIP or POTS, they can block the caller ID making blocking very hard for providers
face it they are scum and a phone is a lot harder to block than IP addresses, the only solution really is to stop SMS entirely, its always the few that ruin it for the majority
Although they are not my carrier, I hope that other carriers will take notice and support them on this issue.
No one should ever have to pay for advertising unless without their consent. If you want to spam me then get my permission and pay me for it. If I agree then pay for part of my bill, not just the cost to send your message, but more so that my service is cheaper.
42
I simply told my provider (Cingular) to disable reception of text messages. Now I get no interruptions, no upfront cost, no message cost.
Texting is for kiddies.
I hate whitelisting. Its just a poor way to protect the end user. There are many instances, both for email, or cell phones where a whitelist will block an important transmission. To push whitelisting as the solution is a cop-out. It increases litigation, but creating good, informed, solid and unambiguous laws is the best way to stop spammers.
Moo.
I'm not sure cellphone spam is such a great prospect from the spammers point of view anyways. You can't easily do nearly the same amount of volume. Based on the numbers from the article, these guys were only sending about one message every two seconds (~43,500 per day). Which may seem like a lot, but it's nothing when contrasted to a lot of e-mail spammers that are sending out millions of e-mails everyday.
Also, I would think that the conversion rate would be lower as well. I mean, with e-mail spam I can understand that a few people out of a million might see and open the message and decide to go to a company's buy whatever product the e-mail is selling. With cell phones, I don't really see the same thing happening as much. With e-mail, someone can click on a link and make an impulse buy in under 5 minutes. With cell spam, the person sees the message and then has to go out of their way to pursue the product.
This question isn't for me. It's for a friend. A guy I know wants to know if the "penis pills" really work.
For the last time, my girlfriend and I are both happy with the length of her penis already (zero inches by the way)! Stop sending her these messages!
Is that the US is supposedly the land of free speech, yet these spammers are being forced to shut down their operations when in fact they are causing no physical harm to anybody.
Sure it's annoying, but so is the preacher standing in the middle of NYC telling us about how the world is going to end. Why should one group get to exercise their right of free speech, yet others don't?
I have a NTT DoCoMo cell phone, and although I use white listing to only allow the few people who actually have my private number to reach me, another form of spam goes on here that does not involve e-mail or text message.
Here seedy companies, usually based in Tokyo phone your number and hang up after 1 ring. They then bank on the fact that you will call them back figuring you missed an important call. The number that comes up on the display is for a pay per min, up front minimum charge service. When you don't pay, they actually send goons to get the money out of you.
Granted it is difficult to block numbers comming from a specific area code, especially if you live in that area. I fortunately do't live in the area where most of these calls come from, so seeing a different area code is a pretty good indication it is spam.
While white listing is a bit of a pain, and as others have pointed out may block important information you were not expecting from comming through, the amount of spam I was getting previous to turing it on was mental. something to the tune of 20 a day using a e-mail address on my phone that there is no way a name generator could come up with. I was limited to 25 characters for my name and I used a random set of numbers and letters as well as the few non-basic characters I was allowd to, and still within 20 min of setting up the account I had spam.
Now if only I could get a spam filter plugin for my phone things would be great, though I do believe the filter should be hosted on DoCoMo's end and configureable by myself.
flinging poop since 1969
In their usual way, Nigeria appears to be leading the way in the causes of spam, but in this case with a slight twist.
A female friend of mine was complaining that she never knew when her cell phone rang at work, when she would turn the ringer off and set it on vibrate mode. In the middle of the lunchroom she exclaimed "It would be so much better if it vibrated longer and harder."
*crickets*
*LAUGHTER*
She was a redhead, and her face went from incandescent to radioactive when she realized what she had said.
That having been said, I'm sure there are probably some women out there who wouldn't mind frequent calls, depending on the phone.
Real simple: in the US, unlike Europe, where the sending/originator of a call or message pays, our scummy mobile phone companies make *US* pay. So, if someone goes to cingular.com and sends me a totally unsolicited message, voila-$.10 for my bill.
And if someone does that 100 times, voila-$10 on my bill. There's not any incentive for the mobile carriers to make it stop, except of customer complaints. Which, in this case, are probably what caused the lawsuit, since Verizon wants to be seen as proactive on the issue. But I really doubt that they mind that much. If there were no complaints, do you think they'd sue?
This should be very easy to do. Company's like AT&T assign email addresses to cell phones like 15555551101@attws.com or something similar. I am surprised I have not received any text message spam yet as one could easily run a script to email through every number in America *@attws.com for some product.
oops, i said too much.
GroupShares Inc. - A Free Stock Community
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artlu.net
Now if they can only do something about that FAX spam that keeps getting sent to my Cellphone as well I will be happy.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Most cell phone providers have limits on the number of text messages a person can send and receive. If your cap is 50 for the month, and you get 4/day, you're 70 messages over your limit. If they charged as 20 cents a message (which some do) that's an extra $14/month.
This doesn't seem like much, but that works out to an extra $168/year (that's enough to buy a new phone every year) per person. Now imagine how many people are getting these messages out of the 4.7 million messages that were sent!
Carriers really need to do this. E-mail costs the ISPs money. This costs the customers money, and if they are too inconvenienced, they will switch providers.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
This does cause harm. With most providers, you are limited to $x number of messages per month. If you use this number of messages on your own, anything you receive in spam costs you money!
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
Because the fact of the matter is that cell phone providers clean up. The cost of providing the service is tiny and quite on par with (if not less than) supporting copper. They don't charge me my regular phone bill by how many people call me, why should they with cell phones? The relative low-cost of supporting cell technology does not support this.
Verizon's lawsuit is in their best interest. Complaints from customers, which will increase unless the problem is addressed, will adversely affect the carrier more than any other party. Though the fault lays with the spammer, not Verizon, it is the latter that will have to deal with dissatisfied customers.
This type of suit, over the long run, will have no effect on spam. Very few spammers are reachable legally. This suit means nothing. One or a dozen spammers out of thousands, most of who are not located in the United States (or other countries that will allow them to be extradited). Pointless.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
It's not the first cell lawsuit and it's not the first Verizon cell lawsuit.
Guess who they dealt with in the past?
Ralsky. Want proof?
This is not some UL/FOAF story - Google "Ralsky Verizon" and you'll get tons of hits...
For all those people who've suggested charging a small price for sending each email to stop spam the presence of so much SMS (or fax outside the USA or long distance in the USA) this shows it won't work. Surely each SMS is costing the spammers to send, unless they've hacked a mobile phone company somewhere yet they are still doing it and must be making enough to cover those costs. If it doesn't work for SMS its not gonna work for email.
Bah!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I have a verizon phone and it gets spammed with all kinds of shit!
No, as far as I know, SMS spam is easier to block (by the network operators, not by the individual users) than e-mail spam.
The most important point here is that sending SMSs costs something (lower prices for bulk sending of SMS messages are offered, but the typical spammer's business model still won't work, even if they just have to pay ~5 cents per message, it's too expensive for spamming). Then, the fact that money has to be paid also helps identifying the source (as far as I know, the identification for billing cannot be forged, so the telephone companies can find out who spammed).
In many European countries, SMS has become absolutely indispensable (and a major source of profit for the telephone companies). I read that in the US (at least under certain circumstances) the recipient rather than the sender has to pay for SMS messages - that's really an idiotic arrangement. I think Americans should rather look how SMS has been implemented in other countries than contemplating to give it up and missing the huge advantages it offers (being able to deliver a message to someone who is too busy to pick up a phone, sending telephone numbers etc.).
I have been using SMS for many years (in Switzerland) and I don't think I have ever received SMS spam.
why is this story filed in YRO?
I got cellphone spam from this very company, and had tried to post it in the 'Ask Slashdot' section some months ago. {2004-02-26 00:25:32 Experience suing cell phone spammers? (Ask Slashdot,Spam) (rejected)}
I did a DNS and phone directory search for the company (The Phoenix Company, Pawtucket , RI), called up the phone phone numbers listed. I also filed a complaint with my cell carrier, and with FCC. I got a form letter response from FCC last month, and thought that was the end of that... till I saw this post.
There is justice in the world after all!!
I guess there's some loophole for sending text spam without being charged, because wouldn't the spammers get charged bigtime for sending millions of texts? I would think charging for messages would deter spamming in the first place. And do people really get charged for recieving messages? how stupid is that? the person who sent it got charge already (right?)
"In America, you can always find a party. In Russia, party always finds you."
I don't know how bad spam is in the US, but in Japan, things have improved markedly over the last year or so. Not so much by the anti-spam law passed two years ago--with predictably negligible effect--but NTT DoCoMo, the largest keitai carrier, has been very proactive in fighting spam itself. Not only do they have user-settable black-and-whitelisting by source (carrier/Internet), domain, or address, they have an address where you can report spam to them, and they shut down spammers' connections pretty quickly. They've also started legal action against some of the worst offenders, though the Japanese legal system is slow enough that it will probably be irrelevant by the time the ruling comes down. My own incoming spam level has dropped dramatically over the last year--down from 10-20/day to 1-2/week.
These crimes of the digital age need to be dealt with swiftly and iron handedness.
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
Put 20c on the cost of sending any text, credit 10c to the account of any cellphone recieving a text. Spammers would have to spend more and recievers of spam would be compensated for having to press delete. Telcos get another 10c a text and will be careful that every text carried is paid for because they will lose the 10c a text if some hacker sends 1,000,000 unpaid text to himself.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Here in the United States, I and many other people still don't have mobile phones. There are many reasons for the slow take up of phones here but spam is not going to help. Resons why spam phone calls are both annoying and successful here include:
1 We are charged for receiving calls!
2 Spammers need not pay - if they are calling local, only the receiver pays.
In the case of local to mobile calls this cross-subsidisation of the landline network by mobile phone customers is a distortion of the market not present in calling-party-pays systems.
Back ontopic, one reason that the spammers were probably caught here is that to mass-SMS in the UK a contract has to be entered into with the relevant mobile provider. Combining this with all digital exchanges for landlines and mobiles, and a tracing operation becomes considerably easier. The chief spammers may have been in Russia but they would have had to have had intermediaries in the UK to set up the contracts and it is presumably through this intermediary that the suspects were traced.
They better not spam me on Peak hour charges! Then they really will feel my wrath!!! But anyways, somebody has got to do something about Spamming. First the mail, then the telephone, the internet, and now my cellphone? People buy cellphones for privacy and now we don't even have that? We should start a do not call list for CellPhone users. It's not violating their first amendment right. It's excersing our rights to freedom of information (or lack thereof if we don't want to listen to it.)