VERY OT: Why don't we get more spam on cell phones?

glauber · Post by **glauber** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 9:38 am

I have a cell phone that also functions as my pager. It's on all the time, and sometimes i have to react to pages that are sent by computer monitoring systems in the middle of the night.

OK, last night i got my first spam emails on this phone. It was annoying, because every time this pager rings it's potentially a big deal, so when it rings, i jump. Since this phone is text only and the spams were probably heavily graphical, they were mostly unreadable, but they seemed to offer a master's degree in three days.

I'm wondering now: why don't i get a lot more spam on this phone? The email address to send a message to the phone is easily guessable (it's just the phone number @ the phone company dot com). It would be trivial for smart@ss spammers to generate all possible combinations of phone emails. I've always assumed the phone company does some aggressive spam filtering, but surely more stuff would go through?

Just wondering...

Canbarelywhistle · Post by **Canbarelywhistle** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 10:02 am

A lot of people have to pay for each message received as a text message. I get unlimited text messages, but I have to pay for weather alerts or daily jokes- that kind of junk. EMail spam to peoples phones would cause an unsolicited service charge that would add up. Users and phone companies would be suing spammers all over the place if that got through. I think phone companies are able to block that advertisement.

glauber · Post by **glauber** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 10:06 am

Canbarelywhistle wrote:EMail spam to peoples phones would cause an unsolicited service charge that would add up.

And why would the spammers care? They may not be easy to sue. Could be located in Russia, for example, or could be a spam containing one of those overseas reverse-billing numbers. But spam of the volume that we see routinely in unfiltered mailboxes would cause most people to cancel their text messaging, making the phone company lose money. This leads me to suspect that it is possible to do much better spam filtering than what our email providers are doing.

GaryKelly · Post by **GaryKelly** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 1:56 pm

Here in the UK (and the rest of Europe), network operators charge to *send* text messages, not to receive them. Consequently the only 'spam' messages I ever receive are from the service providers themselves (vodafone).

avanutria · Post by **avanutria** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 2:08 pm

Gary, in the states it is possible to send a short email to a mobile and have it show as a text message. Can that be done over there? If so, how is it charged?

Chuck_Clark · Post by **Chuck_Clark** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 4:43 pm

glauber wrote:This leads me to suspect that it is possible to do much better spam filtering than what our email providers are doing.

I'd be willing to bet that that's true. SOMEBODY within the industry is profiting - maybe a LOT of somebodies. If that weren't true, both the industry and the republicrats in what passes for our primary legislative body would be more intrerested in doing something about the problem.

Canbarelywhistle · Post by **Canbarelywhistle** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 10:14 pm

Email spam should be no more legal than if I pulled up with a dump truck full of advertisements, papers, those "have you seen me" leaflets, and sweepstakes junk and dumped it onto your doorstep, burying your house.

Walden · Post by **Walden** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 10:22 pm

Canbarelywhistle wrote:Email spam should be no more legal than if I pulled up with a dump truck full of advertisements, papers, those "have you seen me" leaflets, and sweepstakes junk and dumped it onto your doorstep, burying your house.

The email ones are worse, because so many are obscene.

Canbarelywhistle · Post by **Canbarelywhistle** » Wed Jun 30, 2004 10:57 pm

How do they get away with that when children are using computers for email and learning? Dont kids get subjected to obscene sexual stuff when they check thier mail to see what time Timmy is riding his bike after the cartoons? I dont understand this.

GaryKelly · Post by **GaryKelly** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 1:24 am

avanutria wrote:Gary, in the states it is possible to send a short email to a mobile and have it show as a text message. Can that be done over there? If so, how is it charged?

It used to be possible with vodafone, but you had to 'register' for it (ie register for an email account with voda, with your phone number etc). At best the system was flaky, most of the time it didn't work at all.

Some operators (like MMO2, which was BT) offer an online service where you can send text messages for free to any mobile phone, but you have to log on to their website, register with them, and manually type the message into a form on the webpage.

I used to use a service called "Quios", which was free. That was worldwide. You could link a Quios email address to your cellphone, and if anyone sent an email to that address, Quios would route it as a text to your phone. Worked great when I was living in the US, I could send short messages to my friends in the UK who didn't have email. But, it got popular, and they started charging a ridiculous amount for the service, which was a shame.

There's a service over here where you can register your landline phone number and mobile phone number to have them removed from 'official' lists used by the usual cold-calling spammers...it seems to work too. You can see the details here (useful if you're in the UK!):

http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/

Where you'll also see that it's "unlawful" to send spam SMS (text) messages over here.

Cellphone spam is, in my experience anyway, quite rare here. Usually it's some complete b*llocks claiming you've won a 'prize', but you have to dial a premium-rate number (at £1.50 per minute!) to 'claim' it. Yeah right.

IDAwHOa · Post by **IDAwHOa** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 8:34 am

Walden wrote:
Canbarelywhistle wrote:Email spam should be no more legal than if I pulled up with a dump truck full of advertisements, papers, those "have you seen me" leaflets, and sweepstakes junk and dumped it onto your doorstep, burying your house.
The email ones are worse, because so many are obscene.

They also can contain malicious programs that threaten government computer systems.

I have been wondering for quite a while why snail mail spam is tolerated and electronic spam is so aggressively persued by government regulation. I think the above realization finally answers that for me.

In all likelyhood, they don't care how much spam mail WE get, they only care about protecting their computer systems. Not that that is a totally bad thing, but I suspect that if the virus issue were not so much of a threat that the topic would be less critical to regulators.

By the way, Glauber, if you are so disappointed about not getting cell spam, share your number. I am sure we could help solve that proplem for you!!!!!!

glauber · Post by **glauber** » Thu Jul 01, 2004 8:39 am

Not disappointed, just puzzled. I've done enough computer security to think that bad things don't stop happening just because we want them to.

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VERY OT: Why don't we get more spam on cell phones?

Have you got spam in your cell phone, blackberry or pager?

VERY OT: Why don't we get more spam on cell phones?