Can't get enough of that SMS spam

Yet another person writing about SMS spam.

They start off with the key point that the States is fortunate that SMS spam hasn't caught on there yet as much as it has in other countries. But then it goes further to explain the frustrations of a user that regularly gets spam via SMS (which they frustratingly have to pay for).

Just as with the e-mail spammers who always claim that you somehow signed up to receive their junk, the reader doesn't how he can prove he never signed up to receive Sms.ac's text messages. "I never gave my cell phone SMS number to anyone except the Washington, D.C. subway service outage alert system," he says. "I don't know how they got it, but I assume it would be trivial to war-spam a block of cell phone numbers."

This raises to interesting things to consider:
1) does the D.C. subway service (or someone working there with access to the list) sell off the subscriber list?
2) how can we prevent "war-spammers"?

The former is a factor of greed that is going to be tough to overcome. If there is money to be had by doing something, people are going to do it - regardless of the penalties. That said, perhaps in this case there are in fact no penalties at all - so perhaps there need to be some in place.
While this won't deter everyone, it will prevent some from doing it - especially if you can go after the larger entity for it, so that they will enforce it inside their offices. Again, this won't stop a kid in the mailroom from picking up a list and selling it since he might not care about his job that much, but it could go a long way from some marketing schmoe (shmoe?) from raising the point in a meeting that they could pick up extra revenue by selling off the numbers.

The other point is that with e-mail addresses, they are frequently harvested off of the web. There are certainly spammers (or those that sell to spammers) that generate e-mail addresses on the fly and then test to see if they are legit or not, and then sell that list... but for the most part, e-mails are harder to randomly generate and get a hit on them for use in spam.
But phone numbers are in known blocks and you can literally send out a message to the entire block fairly easily and AFAIK there aren't even systems in place that let you know if it was a failed delivery (so you don't even have to worry about the flood of NDRs that one might care about with spammed e-mail).

As I usually add with any post about these - this is hard for me to care too terribly much about right now since I don't even have SMS service for my phone.

Posted by Eric at August 16, 2004 12:04 PM | TrackBack