Cell phone spam

I had never once received spam text messages on my cell phone in the United States but I get about 5-10 spam messages a week on my phone here. I couldn’t tell you what the messages say exactly, but I know they are trying to sell something because most messages include numbers and the yuan symbol “元”. I’m not surprised that it is common in China, because cell phones are more important as a means of communication and accessing information than are landlines, e-mail, and the Internet via personal computers. So naturally, text message spam is more common than telemarketers or e-mail spam. Other than ads on the buildings and billboards, text messages are the most common form of advertisement that I come into contact with. I don’t watch TV often – where the ads are loud and poorly made – and occasionally people hand out printed ads on the street or leave them in the basket of my bicycle.

Well, it looks like text message spam is spreading in the United States, to the tune of 1.5 billion spam messages in 2008.

I have the same grievance with it. I’m charged a few cents for receiving a text message so this spam can cost me money. My phone isn’t very advanced so it doesn’t tell me who the sender is when I receive a new message. Instead I hit “cancel” when it pops up on the screen and go through the menu tree to my message inbox, where I can see the telephone number of the sender and open it if it is from a number in my phonebook. Deleting messages from unknown telephone numbers without opening them requires hitting a few more buttons, so it is an annoyance and a waste of time.

According to the article, 1 out of 32 text messages are spam. If 90-95% of all e-mail messages are spam, spam mobile phone messages may reach that level sometime soon, although cell phone providers seem to have more control over monitoring and blocking unsolicited messages on their network. As cell phones become more advanced and SMS, e-mail, and web browsing more common, are we going to need anti-spam software and virus software on our cell phones?

Note: I can no longer access the front page of this blog. I can still post and edit it and view the comments, but the front page (along with all blogspot pages) will not load. If the censorship swings the other way again, I may lose all access.