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Declaring War on Mobile Phone Spam 251

Posted by timothy from the paying-per-minute dept.
RugbyHoe writes "Silicon.com's Will Sturgeon reports that more than two-thirds of mobile phone users have received spam on their cell phones and raises the concern that spam will become as much of a problem on this medium as it is with e-mail. He continues with a warning that many companies that offer downloadable ring tones are guilty of 'harvesting' your phone number. Think about that the next time you think you need to annoy your neighbors with the latest and greatest fiddy-cent ring tone."
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Declaring War on Mobile Phone Spam More

Declaring War on Mobile Phone Spam

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  • dang! (Score:5, Funny)

    by sweeney37 ( 325921 ) * <mikesweeney@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @12:57PM (#6172684) Homepage Journal
    just when I thought that text message about penis enlargement was someone picking me up!

    why must you dash my hopes Slashdot?!

    Mike

    • Re:dang! (Score:5, Funny)

      by gosand ( 234100 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:00PM (#6173398)
      just when I thought that text message about penis enlargement was someone picking me up! why must you dash my hopes Slashdot?!

      For those not familiar with dating: If a girl mentions something to you about enlarging your penis, she probably isn't picking up on you.

  • Fiddy Cent ringtones??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SomeoneGotMyNick ( 200685 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:00PM (#6172703) Journal
    My ringtones have been costing me a dollar each!!!

  • the most annoying thing is (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:01PM (#6172716)
    With cellular instant messages, the phone user PAYS!

    So far, I've only received one spam, and I talked to my CelTelCo about it. The first 1000 messages are free, but I pay-per-message afterwards.

    I'll cancel that feature if I ever get more than 3 in the same week.
    • i mean, come on, the second or third thing i thought when i realized text messaging was coming was that the spammers would inevitably gravitate towards it as the next big thing.

      i would imagine we'll see this used to hawk more targeted, narrowly-defined products than x10 cameras.

      i hope.

      ed

    • Stupid Americans... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In Europe the person *sending* the SMS message pays. This seems like a pretty effective way to stop spam as well!
      • The person here sending the SMS message pays also. But that's irrelevant since many wireless carriers provide e-mail-to-SMS gateways and there's no charge for sending e-mail (even if mutates into an SMS). The spam originates as e-mail so, to the spammer, your cell phone SMS is just another e-mail address.
    • Hmm, not in the UK and probably the rest of Europe as far as I know. The sender pays. I don't know what happens with roaming so I guess you might get charged to receive messages in that situation.

      • Re:the most annoying thing is (Score:3, Informative)

        by Yarn ( 75 )
        If you reply to the sms you can be charged for any further smses *they* send to you. This is how companies get money for weather announcement services etc.

        Vodaphone is more or less as the forefront of this worrying trend.
        • My understanding is that these services cannot bill you for receiving messages and I do not know any mechanism that they could (except if they're operated by your own mobile phone provider).

          They work by charging you a premium for that initial text message. Premium text services are usually very obvious, being strange numbers with no dialling code and they'll cost you some rate such as 1.50 for the message. That premium buys you whatever you were expecting back - alerts, ring tones or whatever. They could

      • FYI.. that's the way it works. Last person I knew from the UK visiting america was on T-mobile. For incomming calls, she paid, out going calls, she paid. I.e. people phoning her in the UK paid normal mobile rates, where she paid for the international air time or roaming. Needless to say, landline was far cheeper. Good luck finding out how much, dispite the fact that we have t-mobile in the states, uk users are told to call the states support line, and the state side support line tells you to call the U
    • How do you pay? If I get an SMS, I don't pay anything. If I send one however... Usually when you get an SMS you reply, so in that logic indeed you pay. Roaming is different of course, but how often do you really Roam? (Well okay, 2 times a month at least, I agree)

      I don't get much SPAM on my cell either. The occasional advertisement on a game/contest that my cellphone provider offers, but apart from that. Oh, I once had one that really freaked me out. I was speeding badly on small roads and my cell

      • > I don't get much SPAM on my cell either. The
        > occasional advertisement on a game/contest that my
        > cellphone provider offers, but apart from that.

        You're missing the point though.. the concern isn't that people are getting "some" spam today, it's that in the future they will be getting a LOT of it if this problem isn't dealt with now.

        Rewind ten years and ask how many people were concerned about email spam then apply that to this situation.

        Precedents should be set now (no I don't mean in a legal
      • How do you pay? If I get an SMS, I don't pay anything.
        This is carrier-dependent. You don't pay to receive if you're an AT&T customer. You pay $0.02/msg to receive if you're a Verizon customer (unless you buy a bulk package, then you pay to receive only if you've exceeded your package). Other carriers vary also.
    • I don't know about you, but I pay for email as well...
    • With spam the recipient pays too. What's your point?

      One of the local telcos around here had a cool deal where you could people on a whitelist and you would be charged if those people called you. If the person wasn't on a list, THEY would be charged for the call. Companies should adopt something like this for text messaging. I think it'd stop cellspam in a heartbeat.

      • That's not in the interests of the telcos. That'll lower their revenues. Until the small local telcos can start threatening the competitive giants, they won't change. This is the price we're paying for a poorly conceived break-up of AT&T... one large monopoly replaced by many small monopolies.
    • I would call my carrier and demand refunds for all unsolicited commercial messages. Eventually the mobile carriers themselves will put pressure on legislators to extend unsolicited commercial call protection to text messages as well. In the U.S., it's illegal for telemarketers to call cell phones.

  • legal? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kaitos ( 185784 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:02PM (#6172728)
    I thought that was illegal, since you will pay for them to send you spam. Am I correct about this?

    • Re:legal? (Score:2, Informative)

      by hutman ( 551773 )
      All sorts of things seem to be illegal but that doesn't really stop anyone. In Minnesota, junk faxes and automated calling (where the answering machine calls you) is apparently illegal. Yet I get a ton of that stuff. What needs to happen is for a significant number of people to start calling their attourney general to stop companies from doing this stuff.

  • Depends alot on your network. (Score:4, Informative)

    by rkz ( 667993 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:02PM (#6172730) Homepage Journal
    I have got 3 sim cards the first 2 were on vigin mobile a virtual provider who uses T-mobile's network and both of them got a bucketload of spams, now I've got a O2-UK sim card and that number NEVER gets phone spam.

    If you're getting a lot of it now might be the time to change operator
    • Unsolicited phone spam makes me furious, clogging up my phone's puny memory and requiring manual deletion. The only time I think it is justifiable is for roaming (when you get a welcome message telling you various things about the network) or for system outage information. Otherwise it should definitely be opt-in.

      I suspect people on pay as you go plans are likely to be abused by their telcos however. O2 spammed me a couple of times about competitions, so perhaps they got a clue on how angry it makes peopl

    • I have got 3 sim cards the first 2 were on vigin mobile a virtual provider who uses T-mobile's network and both of them got a bucketload of spams, now I've got a O2-UK sim card and that number NEVER gets phone spam.

      If you're getting a lot of it now might be the time to change operator

      SMS spam is purely random and has nothing to do with your network provider.

      The way most spam merchants work is that they send SMS's out to a range of numbers, say 07901 000000 to 07901 999999. If you're in that range, yo

    • Changing operator?

      I have gotten like 5 or so unsolicited text messages (SMS is for europeans, in america we call it Freedom Text! ;)) from my provider. Thats my provider (which sure as shit doesnt pay for them) telling me about upgrades and stuff to my accout, or offers that I could take advantage of.

  • personally.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Transient0 ( 175617 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:03PM (#6172740) Homepage
    ...I think that if you have a land line as well as a cell phone, you can probably afford to set up your cell phone as a white-list system (accepting only calls from people in your directory list on the phone's memory). I can think of a few reasons you might not want to do this, but it still seems like a pretty good solution to me.

    It's hardly a surprise that this is happening though, this is really no different than what has happened with land-line phones, e-mail and ICQ/IRC in the past. Advertising expands to fill all available spaces. The only difference here is that there is a very quantifiable cost involved with cell phones (unlike the percentage-of-bandwidth types of measurement with e-mail spam). If anything this should speed up the passing of an anti-cellphone spam law. IANAL, but shouldn't the existing laws for landlines also cover cell phones in some cases anyway?
    • The only difference here is that there is a very quantifiable cost involved with cell phones

      That is the most straightforward way to look at it, but I also look at it in 2 other ways. Filtering through unwanted messages, be it e-mail, SMS or otherwise, takes time. Time is money - if you are a consultant getting paid hourly, you can literally put a monetary value on the time it takes you to filter out the garbage. Since I do my e-mail filtering on the client-side, it can sometimes take as long as 10 minu

  • Pricefight (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rastakid ( 648791 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:05PM (#6172768) Homepage Journal
    I think phone spamming will never get to the height of e-mail spamming. The reason is simple: sending out bulk e-mail costs almost nothing, sending out bulk phone messages is way more expensive. Of course there are ways around this (think cracking), but I think that will stop a lot of spammers.

    • Re:Pricefight (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cwiegand ( 200162 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:10PM (#6172834) Homepage
      Actually, it IS as easy as sending email - most cellular phones also have an email address (for example, to send to an ATT mobile phone, use ##########@mobile.att.net)

      I get TONS of spam, and the ONLY company I have EVER given that number to - MSN Alerts. Hmmmm....
      • Please mod parent up.

        It is trivially easy for spammers to conduct "dictionary attacks" against mobile phone email-to-SMS gateways -- the namespace for addresses in such domains is reasonably small (10^10 permutations for the entire domain of US phone numbers -- much smaller when you take into account the limited number of area codes and prefixes assigned to the providers).

        Other domains: vtext.com, messaging.sprintpcs.com, etc.

        Frankly I'm surprised that it isn't a serious problem already.

        • Re:Pricefight (Score:3, Insightful)

          by tomhudson ( 43916 )
          One of the things cell-phone providers could do to bring an end to dictionary attacks on their pc-to-cell phone sms ystems is to require a user-chosen 3-to-5-digit passcode be prepended or appended to the cell number. If the gateway doesn't recognize the passcode, the spam doesn't go through, and all further text messges from that IP are blocked for 5 minutes.

          example where number is 514-222-333 and passcode is 12345:

          514222333312345 - text message gets sent

          5142223333 - text message is blocked

          You go i

      • Actually, it IS as easy as sending email - most cellular phones also have an email address (for example, to send to an ATT mobile phone, use ##########@mobile.att.net)

        Sounds like an email problem, not a mobile phone problem. Probably harvesters sending emails to all combinations of email addresses are getting their message in the hands of phone users, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

        The providers could handle this in a variety of ways - they decided to set up the numbers as email addresses.

    • In addition, the cell network providers will be much more sensitive to abuse of bandwidth than the average ISP - it will be in their own best interests to hunt these vermin down...

    • Re:Pricefight (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) <scott@alfter.us> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:43PM (#6173209) Homepage Journal
      I think phone spamming will never get to the height of e-mail spamming. The reason is simple: sending out bulk e-mail costs almost nothing, sending out bulk phone messages is way more expensive.

      How do you figure that's the case?

      #!/bin/sh

      i=0
      while [ $i -lt 10000 ]
      do

      echo "Baked beans are off!" | mutt -xs "Lovely spam, wonderful spam..." 702555`echo $i | awk '{i=sprintf("0000%i",$0); printf("%s",substr(i,length(i)-3, 4))}'`@mobile.example.com
      i=`expr $i + 1`
      done

      That doesn't cost you anything more than any other kind of spam, yet you've just sent a message to all of the phones in a particular exchange. Some more tweaking would loop through other exchanges, other area codes, and different service providers.

  • Do-Not Call List? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by broller ( 74249 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:08PM (#6172811)
    My state has a "Do Not Call" list which I can sign up with to opt-out of unsolicited marketing calls at home. What about cell phones? Do they fall under these types of laws in most\some\any states?

  • At least on a cell phone... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:09PM (#6172818) Homepage
    I don't pay for it. If the sender pays, there's still hope. Since there's no such thing as a free lunch, somebody somewhere must have a name and billing address that can be sued. I've certainly not had a SPAM problem on my cell phone, in fact I don't think I've had a single SPAM message.

    Of course all those "SMS your answer to XXXX to take part in the competition" all put the "We can send you commercial email" in the fine print, so I don't use it for that. But that makes it solicitated commercial email, which technically isn't SPAM. Just as all the half-hidden checkboxes on free email account sign-ups aren't either.

    Kjella
    • Lots/most people do pay for receiving SMS on their cell phones - either they pay for each or they pay for each after XXX free. In any case, it's going to get worse before it gets better.
    • I found out through several hours of talking to morons at the help desk of Cingular Wireless (Texas area split off from Southwestern Bell) that SMS messages are sent via email addresses through a central server system. They don't even run it--they simply contract for their numbers to be funneled through the system--so Cingular couldn't even add features (or remove them, in my case).

      I asked them to block all SMS to my phone, because I never used it and knew nobody would use it to contact me. They denied

  • Netherlands (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zmooc ( 33175 ) <zmooc@[ ]oc.net ['zmo' in gap]> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:09PM (#6172825) Homepage
    Vodafone starts filtering SMS-spam as of sometime this month. Here [webwereld.nl]'s more information but it's in dutch... I'm not sure if it's happening in the Netherlands only btw.

  • Provider Spam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mashx ( 106208 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:11PM (#6172855)
    One of the most annoying spam I get is when I cross borders in Europe, which I do every week. Because my phone is roaming, it means it changes local provider regularly, but if I haven't been in that particular country for a week or so, I get a sickly message telling me "Welcome to dial for services, have a nice stay." Okay the first time, but when you end up getting these every week, and sometimes many times a week, it is just annoying, especially with no way to stop them.

    Well, except that it was amusing when entering Belgium you get a welcome message for Greece... Typical Orange: since it was taken over by France Telecom, it's just been one long journey downhill.

  • Maybe it's time to simply class all the different types of spam (email, telemarketing, SMS, junk mail, FAX) together? - i.e simply have "do not contact" lists rather than different ones for each technology, so when the varblethrumpulator(TM) is invented we don't have to battle for new laws to specifically stop spamming arriving over it...
  • Implicit in this story is the fact that in the US, the receiver, not the sender, pays for the message. In Europe (at least in the UK) you must pay to send the message: a few cents or less if you shop around, but it is a price that the spammers have to pay which adds up if they want to do a large broadcast. The main problem here at the moment is pornographic spam sent to children's mobiles, or spam sent with premium-rate return numbers urging you to call back immediately for money/sex etc. which is annoyin
    • I really all depends on the subscription you select. Some (like Nextel) include a certain number of mssages received per month (500 in my case) in your plan for free, with overages charged per message received. I think very few plans offer the ability to send text messages at no extra charge. You generally have to opt up for a higher plan to get the capability, and then it's capped with overage fees. If you really worked it out, you could figure out the cost per message, but they're generally included, and

  • Government SPAM (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BladeRider ( 24966 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:16PM (#6172910) Homepage
    While I was in Kuwait earlier this year, I noticed the Kuwait Ministry of the Interior sent cell phone SPAM messages almost daily (in English and Arabic) with government "feel good" messages" -

    "Remain calm! All is well!"

    JH

  • Filtering (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ecloud ( 3022 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:17PM (#6172919) Homepage Journal
    The trouble is that spam filtering is hard to do, because anybody can send email to whatever address your service provider creates. Anybody know of a way to force email going to that address to first pass through another server, where it can be filtered? Any MX record tricks? I can't see any way to do that. Ideally the service providers would also offer web-mail service for your phone emails, where every email that gets sent to your phone is also stored on that server, and you can read them later and tag your spams, and then they do Bayesian filtering on those. But telecoms always have such hysteresis about adopting new ideas, I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.

    Of course as phones begin to run real operating systems rather than some proprietary Nokia OS, and it gets to be easier to write applications for them, you could just do filtering right on the phone. My 3360 doesn't seem to have any options like that, and I can't find much info on how to write applications for these phones either. But, I've only gotten 3 or 4 SMS spams in over a year, so far so good...
    • Well, I've just got cell@mydomain.org set up to forward to my phone email, I'll never give out the actual email address, so if I started to get email spam on it, all I've got to do is remove the email forward for that address and create a new one.(using zoneedit)

  • 2/3rds of WHO? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:18PM (#6172928)
    Will Sturgeon reports that more than two-thirds of mobile phone users have received spam on their cell phones

    Two thirds of who? Unless they surveyed the soccer moms, the 15 year old kids etc- I'd guess the statistic is heavily biased. For example, if it was an internet survey, you just nix'd a HUGE percentage of the population- a percentage of the population which is highly unlikely to have their #'s published on the internet, or use SMS, or even know what the hell SMS is- and I bet companies that send SMS messages to you legitimately(news/sports updates, and the article-mentioned ringtones) are happily selling out every address.

    I've -never- recieved spam on my phone. Why? I don't give it to anyone unless they -need- it. I also don't advertise it on my webpage. I don't use sports/news/weather alert crap. There are groups of people who have to give their # out to clients etc, and who put it on their company/personal webpages. They're gonna get spam, that simple.

    So where'd that statistic come from? If you scan through the article, you find the source:

    "A recent survey conducted by Silicon.com reveals that 69 percent of respondents have received spam on their mobile phone." (side note: the entire article is actually from Silicon.com, some two-bit site).

    So, we have a no-name site giving no information about how the survey was conducted(online? People off the street? Telephone? Magazine card? Mobile device convention? All will return drastically different results). We have no information about the demographics of the respondants, and whether they match cell phone users as a whole. Thus it is impossible to verify their claim of "all cell phone users".

    When are people going to learn that you CANNOT generalize? You MUST be specific. As an example(and not implying that this is the exact situation in the story)- "Two thirds of respondants at a mobile communications conference said they had received spam on their cell phone". Yet some marketdroid would happily turn that into "two thirds of cell phone users get spam on their cellphone!"

  • It is really pathetic if people are afraid of publishing their phone numbers or email addresses for fear of spam. At least, it should be made sure that one can safely make his phone number known to all without causing him any direct monetary or mental (obscene jokes anyone?) harm. He may just waste some time shuffling around.

    So I suggest the following things to be done:

    • You shouldn't be charged for receiving SMS. Of course, there can be some receiver-paid SMS services for the situations where this is

  • Telephone Consumer Protection Act (Score:5, Informative)

    by Quietust ( 205670 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:20PM (#6172948) Homepage
    Code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, Volume 3, Parts 40 to 69 [junkfaxes.org]

    Sec. 64.1200 Delivery restrictions.

    (a) No person may:

    (1) 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,

    (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
    • -1, Irrelevant

      The argument can be made that no one is "initiating a telephone call" of any sort to your cellphone. Granted I haven't received a single spam of any type (voice or data) on my cellphones, ever, in 9 years, so I don't have anything to complain about.

      This rule should, but does not, apply to the discussion.
    • Hmmmm...so if I get a landline phone service that charges for incoming calls (these *do* exist, at least here in Michigan), then it is ILLEGAL for telemarketers to call me? heheheh...I *like* that...

  • Bad problem already (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Chaltek ( 610920 ) * on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:21PM (#6172962) Homepage
    AT&T wireless provides an email->SMS gateway already. phonenumber@mobile.att.net will send an SMS to whatever poor shmuck has the number. As far as I can tell, there is no filtering, because I get an average of 4 spams per day on my phone now. It has been getting steadily worse over the last year.

    I've never posted my phone number with the domain or used it anywhere, but 10 million spams will cover a whole area code and hit quite a few cell phones, especially if you target the new area codes overlaid specially for mobile devices. Alternately, spammers could harvest phone numbers online (e.g. resumes, personal pages) and compare them against online phone directories, assuming a greater probability of hitting a cell phone with an unlisted number.
    The latter is my pet theory for how my own problem got so bad.

    I'd like AT&T to implement some filtering and/or a whitelist option.


    Just my 2 cents. Take it or leave it. ~Kirk
    • I know back when I used a pager it was a simple mater of structuring a url in order to send my self a page. I imagine that someone could do the same bloody thing on any website that offers web->SMS services

      Unlike email->sms which typicaly is a seperate service, web->sms pretty much covers anyone who chooses to use SMS messaging.

  • We need to outlaw advertising. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kaltkalt ( 620110 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:22PM (#6172982)
    I've said it before... we need to outlaw all forms of intrusive advertising. By intrusive, I mean directed directly at a recipient (each ad sent one at a time). TV commercials are not such types of ads, but junk (physical) mail, spam, cellphone spam, fliers on your doorknob, fliers handed out in public, and even a salesperson saying to you in a public noncommercial place (not in a store) "Hi how are you today...." It all needs to be made illegal. No freedom of speech issues; there will still be viable (legitimate) ways a business can advertise. Word of mouth, however, is the only legitimate form of advertising. All others are illegitimate but necessary evils (better to have commercials on tv than have to put in a quarter). But all this "direct marketing" should be completely illegal, in every possible form, current or yet-to-be developed. As far as I'm concerned the Direct Marketing Association is a criminal organization. They're almost as bad as NAMBLA.

    If we don't outlaw (with SEVERE punishment; jailtime and fines) direct marketing/advertising, eventually all technology will be rendered useless. Write your congressman....

  • You're expected to pay for ring tones?

    I just received my first cell phone (part of my new job), which has 4,289 ring tones built-in, 4,288 of which are horribly obnoxious. So one of my first impulses was to see if there was a way to download an arbitrary .WAV file to the phone and have it be used as the ring tone.

    Strange. There doesn't seem to be a consistent way of doing this. And I kept bumping into Web sites offering catalogs of ring tones -- for a "nominal fee." I thought to myself, "Self, peopl

  • THIS will cause SPAM law change (Score:3, Insightful)

    by doublem ( 118724 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:30PM (#6173060) Homepage Journal
    This will do more to change SPAM laws than anything else.

    Let's be blunt, SPAM is an issue, but most well paid managers either have SPAM filters running on their network or a secretary who sorts through their mail for them.

    This will annoy the people who carry cell phones, and they don't have IT departments and secretaries sorting through their cell phone for them.

    This will harass the high power salesman who shows off what hot S*** he is by taking phone calls in meetings.

    I'm tempted to list off other situations where this will really piss people off, but I won't bother.

    Let your imagination run wild, and keep in mind there are people who can't tell the difference between the first "Incoming call" ring and the tone their phone makes, and as a result could find themselves dashing out of the shower for what they think is an important call.

  • Providers could fix this (Score:3, Interesting)

    by koreth ( 409849 ) * on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:31PM (#6173071)
    A few months back I wrote to my cell provider (SprintPCS) asking them if they could block E-mail to my cellphone that didn't come from a short list of valid senders. For me, that would completely solve the problem, since I'd set the only valid sender to a forwarding address behind my mail server's spam filter. But no, they said, the only way to block any text messages was to turn off the Internet access feature entirely; text messaging is a component of that product in their lineup. The level of spam hasn't gotten bad enough to drive me to do that yet, but if it grows by 2x or 3x, it'll no longer be worth it to get the messages I do want.

    It can't be that hard to put a simple whitelist filter and a simple web-based management UI in place.

    If they don't do that or something else to stem the tide of spam, they'll find themselves minus one customer; the reason I'm with them now is because they're the only provider for the phone I like to use (Samsung SPH-I300) but the major reason I like the phone is because I can use it to ssh to my server from the road -- and if I have to turn off Internet access to kill the spam, I may as well shop for a new phone and a new provider.

    And yes, I think the policy of tying phones to providers is part of the problem, but I don't see that changing in the US any time soon.

  • It is worse for each individual cell-phone user because their is a clearly identifiable cost involved. That call costs the recipient money.

    It is not worse because legislation already exists related to unsolicited phone calls. Emails have been evading that because the technology didn't even exist until the last decade.

  • Why Phone Spam Is Unethical... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prestidigital ( 341064 ) * on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:36PM (#6173128) Journal
    ...and should be illegal. I want to be careful not to make an assertions that would jeopardize the 1st Amendment, but I feel that telemarketing in general is unethical. Here's my reasoning:

    I pay a lot of money for various phone services (> $100/month). Advertising is not one of those services. My phone is not a free ride for marketers.

    When telemarketers use the phone line to reach my phone, they are getting a free ride on a service for which I am the one who pays. In a very real sense, I am paying for someone else to have the ability to advertise to me. This is just ridiculous. My land line (which I am essentially required to maintain in order to have certain other utilities) might as well be a direct connection to commercials 24/7. Literally, something like 1 call in 100 is not phone spam. That means I'm paying $20-something dollars per month for the privilege of receiving advertisements. Ridiculous. Would I do this willingly?! Of course not. Do I have a choice? Apparently not. My phone and my wallet are held hostage by telemarketers.

  • UK phone spam (Score:5, Informative)

    by Darren Winsper ( 136155 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:39PM (#6173176)
    In the UK, SMS spam is starting to become a real problem, but it seems people obey the TPS system. Register your number at http://www.tps-online.org.uk and say goodbye to your troubles. I registered my number a little under a year ago and I haven't got any spam since.

  • In Finland (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:41PM (#6173189)
    In Finland the caller always pays, and it is illegal to send spam or try to sell stuff via sms. No offence but in most countries people are trying to figure out what Americas cellphone companies are trying to accomplish, cause they just dont seem to know what they are doing.
    • While I don't know a mobile subscriber in Finland personaly [yes I do know people there without mobiles]... I would imagine there is some form of e-mail to phone based service rather then sms mobile to mobile.

      E-mail isn't really equiped to be billed for by the sender. People who I know in countries that bill like europe does (caller pays), subscribers pay extra for e-mail to mobile service, flat rate per so many e-mails, and charge per mail above and beyond that.

      But cases where I was billed for incomming

  • charge the sender (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:43PM (#6173210)
    In Hong Kong, it costs $ to send sms. So, no one sends spam or has $ to send spam. However, company do pay cellular service providers for phone # (trust me, your cellular service provider sells your # and even your phone record for behavior tracking.) and pay to send message (promotions) to those #. Since it costs $, promotional mesg is not very often.
  • I wonder if telemarketing laws would apply? I know it is not a voice call they are making, but if they send a message to a number that is on a do not call list could they be fined?

  • Beat the Phone Spam (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:50PM (#6173298)

    Before I got call intercept service, everytime I got a telemarketing call on my land phone line , this was my conversation with the telemarketer:

    Telemarketer - "Sir, my name is Poor_Kid and I am calling on to let you know about our new offer called Rip_you_off"

    Me - "Why did you call me on my cellphone"

    Telemarketer - "Sir, I am sorry. I did not know that it was your cellphone number"

    Me - "You bet it is !! Now take my cellphone number off of your call list."

    Telemarketer - "Will do sir. You have a good day."

  • Get ready for something worse -- voice spam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HiKarma ( 531392 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:51PM (#6173302)
    You think SMS spam is bad, soon we'll see voice spam. Yes, it's already illegal within most countries to call somebody to play a recording, but the price of the telecom infrastructure is getting low enough to make it productive to do from overseas.

    Unlike email and SMS spam, content analysis, filters and bayes will not help you deal with voice spam. The only thing you can do is track high volume users and shut them down.

    And caller-ID has less security than you think.

    Voice spam will be a curse on VoIP where there are not per minute costs, just bandwidth costs. And while there is security there in the specs, it is rarely implemented.

    Solutions will be harder to find here.

    • Easy (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CaptainZapp ( 182233 ) *
      I have the phone company block numbers, who don't transmit their id.

      Free service and helps like a charm.

  • Against CA Law. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Zaphod B ( 94313 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @01:54PM (#6173344) Journal
    According to California Business and Professions Code 17538.41 [ca.gov] et seq., mobile phone spam is illegal and the victim may recover $500 plus court costs should he bring an action against the spammer.

  • SMS Spam already bad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by z_gringo ( 452163 ) <z_gringo&hotmail,com> on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:01PM (#6173420)

    The problem is already pretty bad, and the worst part is that the worst offenders are the Telefon companies. Telefonica is constantly sending me SMS messages saying they will let me send 10 messages for free, or suggesting that I might want to change to a different plan etc. It's even worse when roaming outside of Spain. When in Franc for example, every time I change from one carriers tower to another or go under a tunnel, I get a new SMS saying "welcome to France! If you want to check your voice mail on the road, blah blah blah" That pretty much makes the phone more annoying than useful, since it's beeping with a new SMS all day long.

  • Would an ad-paid phone be too silly? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by timothy ( 36799 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:02PM (#6173425) Journal
    This is not a joke: I would not mind phone ads, under certain (not current) circumstances.

    In the same way that I like advertisers to subsidize the creation of Futurama (well, past tense) and for me to watch reruns of Columbo, I would happily allow advertisers to pay for my phone use.

    How? Imagine a system where between each phone call, you agree to listen to an advertisement, which would be (you guessed it) *very* closely tailored to you. e.g., no tampax ads for men, no thinning hair cures for men for 16-year-old girls.

    Would I like to have *unsolicted* spam sent to me? No. Would I voluntarily let through a few ads each day in exchange for a bill of zero dollars? Yes.

    Note there are a lot of permutations here, could be a limit of free calls, longer ads for more air time, maximum call length without hitting a surcharge, etc.

    I would not want an hour of this, but there's probably a happy medium. Ask yourself, are you completely opposed to letting advertisers subsidize other things? And if the answer is No, wouldn't you rather let the spammers (who could be "advertisers") at least chip in toward the useful side of things?

    timothy

  • Internet on the phone (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Zed2K ( 313037 )
    Do you really need the internet on your phone in the first place? I haven't found a need for it yet. I never use SMS or email to the phone (incoming our outgoing). i don't want to go to web pages on the phone. Ring tones are so damn annoying I refuse to use them. The games you download are cheesy, I don't want to sit there staring at a double sized postage stamp screen playing a lame game.

    If I'm away from my computer I don't want to see any email! If people want me they call me and I decide if I want

  • Oh No! Not a "War On" cell phone spam... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dameron ( 307970 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:07PM (#6173485)
    Now it'll live forever!

    I'm sick of hearing about the "War on" this or the "War on" that. As a civilization we're well past this cheap and easy metaphor. Why "war on" anything? How well have our past "Wars" gone:
    • LBJ's war on poverty
    • Nixon's war on cancer
    • Reagan's war on drugs
    • W's war on terrorism
    To paraphrase the best source [mnftiu.cc] for "War" info: remember when we had that war on drugs and now there aren't drugs anymore?


    Seems having a "War on" something makes it omnipresent and ustoppable.


    -dameron

  • "Uh hello?"

    "HI! How would YOU like to be the first on your block to buy a mint commerative Asian penis enlarging hair restoring stay hard college loan credit reducing pyramid scheme from Africa?"

    "Capn' Taco! It's for you."

  • Brings up an interesting thought.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lynx_user_abroad ( 323975 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:13PM (#6173563) Homepage Journal
    Eventually, SMS providers will find their price point. Maybe it will be a cent per message, or a fraction of a cent. Whatever. They might even find they can charge people to to receive messages sent by others, and people will pay it.

    The SMS Spammers, too, have a price point. Maybe they will find they can tolerate having to spend a cent per message sent in the way some email Spammers have found they can tolerate losing accounts at a rate of one per minute. I don't think MMF scams are that lucrative, but who knows?

    But what happens if the price point for the SMS providers and the price point for the SMS Spammers are compatible? You won't see SMS providers kicking SMS Spammers off their network as long as they pay their bill.

    In a way, this has already happened in email, thus our spam problems there. It also seems to have happened (to some extent) with telemarketing. I don't know if we'll see this problem develop with SMS, but I do belive many many services are vulnerable to this threat. Will we eventually see a problem of IM spamming (more than we already have)? What about SPAM files on P2Pnetworks? (Oh wait; we've seen that one too.) I wonder how easy it will be to tie a SPAMblaster into a SIP-phone implementation for automated telemarketing once SIP phones become commonplace? I wonder how long after that we'll see a SIP-enabled PROCMAIL filter.

    More generally; are we as a society willing to tolerate such SPAM-cancer in all of our communication networks, or will we eventually evolve into a society where we cannot even talk to each other unless we've already been whitelisted?

    Free Speech means nothing if we all chosen to go deaf. I sense bad Juju here.

  • Japanese Carriers fixed this problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TheAB ( 38019 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:21PM (#6173636)
    Japan has always been a bit ahead of us in the cellphone business, and they have fixed this problem. No longer does your cellphone have ##########@att-mobile.net, but instead its a 20 character random string (ex: d3f65f2ks8iure0kh8b7@docomo.ne.jp), with the option of setting your own alias as well.

    This doesnt entirely alievate the problem, but it does increase the time needed for a while loop to hit the entire user base. Supposedly this has helped.

    The number of characters might be variable as well (not sure about this), which would increase the time needed even more.

  • Phone number harvesting (Score:3, Funny)

    by HopeUnknown ( 668633 ) on Wednesday June 11, 2003 @02:28PM (#6173709) Homepage Journal
    ...many companies that offer downloadable ring tones are guilty of 'harvesting' your phone number.

    I find it amusing that as I read this article, Slashdot is displaying banner ads for "49 cent ringtones and graphics!", "Free Nokia Ringtones", and "RingtoneJukebox.com."

  • Harvesting? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sinus0idal ( 546109 )
    The way I see it, there is no need to harvest mobile numbers using free phone ringtone services etc. Surely mobile phone numbers can be targeted for sms sending in much the same way as a wardialler - just working through the numbers.

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