Slashdot Mirror
Verizon Fights Back Against Mobile Phone Spam
The Register is reporting that Verizon filed two separate lawsuits earlier this week against companies it claims spammed their customers with automated telemarketing calls. In addition to seeking a cease and desist, they are also apparently seeking "monetary damages."
Just a reality check for anyone who thinks there is such a thing as "Free SMS services" on the Internet: If you are offered something "free" on the Internet where you have to give away your mobile phone number then you can pretty much be sure that you WILL be paying a price in the form of spam. There is no thing as a free lunch...
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
That's what's being done in France and Belgium. But there's a simple reason why it works there and not in the US: it's easy for people to recognize a cell phone number. In France, a cellphone number starts with 06, in Belgium, a cellphone number has 10 digits instead of 9. This means that someone who dials such a number knows he's calling a cellphone number, and therefore knows he's gonna be hit with a higher rate.
In the US, if you charged people more to dial a number that looks exactly like a landline phone number, you'd quickly have a slew of lawsuits from people who stayed on the phone for hours, only to discover it wasn't a normal phone number and they're broke or something. That's why the cost is shared in the US: the caller pays for whatever is normally paid to call a landline phone, and you pay the difference.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
This is less common in the UK because it costs more to call mobiles than land lines, and less of an irritation because it costs nothing to receive a 'phone call or text. If it is irritating you register with the TPS and you have legal recourse against anyone 'phoning to with unsolicited sales or marketing calls. Unsolicited commercial SMS is already illegal under the Privacy and Electronic Communications EC Directive, and so you already have legal recourse there.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Apparently
"calls from companies with which you have an established business relationship" are allowed by automatic dialers...
http://www.dmaconsumers.org/telephoneconsumerprote ctionact.html
Orange UK have a procedure for dealing with Text spam: just forward the complete message it to 7726 and Orange either blocks the sender from sending more, or blocks access to any premium or national rate numbers mentioned (not sure which)
<URL:http://www.orange.co.uk/about/contact/spam/>
"customer not registered with or not on the don't bother calling me list for 31+ days"... What are you talking about? The do-not-call list doesn't apply to cell phones... The FCC has lond held it illegal to spam cell phones.
Presumably they report the offenders as they have broken the law - text spam is illegal in the UK.
Vodafone UK and O2 have a similar scheme - the number you forward it to is the same on all networks. It's easy to remember because it spells out SPAM on the phone keypad.
For about $60 (including taxes), a mobile phone subscription in the US generally includes about 500 minutes (albiet with calls charged by the minute, not the second, and with you charged for listening to the other end ring, albeit only if the call is ultimately connected - this probably means that a comparable UK tariff would be 300-400 anytime minutes), unlimited nights and weekends, and (increasingly) unlimited in-network mobile to mobile calling. Calls that get diverted to voicemail are not charged for, either to the phone owner or the caller. Just as in the UK, a mobile on such a tariff can be used anywhere in the country and all minutes can be used to call anywhere in the country. Though, in this case, the country has five times the population and 100 times the square footage. That's generally the type of tariff most Americans subscribe to.
There's a lot of experimenting with prepay here, and interestingly one direction they're going down is simply replicating these types of tariff as prepay tariffs rather than only offering pay-as-you-go. Despite a lot of interest in making it work, the "mobile pays" model really kills pay-as-you-go at the moment.
To me, having gotten used to it, I have to say I'd rather have the American tariff than the (current) UK tariffs I've seen. It's essentially worry-free, I can completely - without impacting anyone else - replace my landline with a mobile phone (because friends and family are not hit with absurdly high charges when they call me, and because there are more minutes in my tariff than I can use in practice: it's almost an unmetered connection, especially when the social calls, the calls that go on for hours, are generally on the weekends anyway.) I don't feel like I could do that in the UK because you just don't get enough minutes, and because anyone calling you is going to have to pay through the nose to talk to you.
The downside is that a lot of US employers expect you to give them your mobile number and (and this infuriates me) will call it in preference to your home number. The other downside is that pay-as-you-go, while available, just isn't terribly practical: the bar for getting mobile service is a little higher than it is in the UK.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Perhaps the worst violater of sending unsolicited SMS messages is the company SMS.ac out of San Diego, California.
They've got a track record of trcking users into giving up their passwords to AOL and Hotmail accounts and then using the addresses those accounts contain to send messages to your friends and family that appear to have been sent by the unsuspecting victim. In one case Joi Ito was compromised and when he pubilshed his troubles on his blog they threatened him with legal action!
A search on Technorati http://technorati.com/search/sms.ac%20complaints will reveal an astonishing number of people that have been victimized by this company.
If you haven't heard about this, you really should take a few minutes to check out the scam. The lure is free sms messages...they claim 5 per day, but what happens is shortly after you sign up you begin receiving "friend requests" not dozens, but four or five a day. This doesn't seem like much but if your premium sms charge is 0.50 and you get 5 per day times 30 days per month well...most people on /. can handle that math.
I signed up to do an investigation for my blog and discovered some support for the complaint that these "friend requests" are company originated. Over the course of 3 months I had probably at least half a dozen requests by different screen names with the same photos as well as multiple requests by the same screen name.
Now if there are the millions of members they claim, what are the odds of two people scraping the same images? And of course two different people with the same screen name is an impossibility.
Adding insult to injury (I mean besides the couple hundred bucks I shelled out to verify this) the company actually had the audacity to post a "Cellular Bill of Rights" in my opinion, this is like the fox being left to guard the chickens.
Of course unlike Voice Spammers that are paying to place and terminate their calls, the folks at SMS.ac obviously aren't paying much if anything. Complicit in this, though to what degree they're aware of the issue is Qpass http://qpass.com/ and their m-Qube system for non-operator originated mobile wallet billing.
Personally, I believe enough complaints to Qpass would put a dent in SMS.ac's evil ways. Believe me, they are evil. People lose their phones over this, and it's the one's that can't afford it...kids that didn't know any better who get hurt. Read the complaints for a while and you'll be as indignant as I was when I wrote about their Cellular Bill of Rights http://technorati.com/search/sms.ac%20complaints
There is no "I" in B-O-R-G.