Cell phone texting spam--article [telecom]

This is an issue that bugs me--spam sent to cell phone as text messages that the recipient must pay for, and the lack of responsiveness from the cell phone carriers. I got a few such spams that I had to pay for and my only option was to turn off texting capability; an option I think is wrong but I had no other reasonable choice.

An article in the Phila Inqr discusses this further. See:

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Can't the cell phone carriers use ANI to trace back to the offending source? If the caller spoofed their callback number (as I suspect they do), couldn't they be prosecuted for that?

Reply to
Lisa or Jeff
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Some SMS arrive at a cell phone after going through an email-to-SMS gateway. For example, any internet email client can send email to snipped-for-privacy@tmomail.net (to illustrate with a made-up T-Mobile email addie), and if 212-333-4444 *is* the cellular number of a T-Mobile subscriber, the first (roughly) 150 characters of that email are sent to that subscriber's handset as an SMS.

I've had spam like that -- even the "Sender:" data was spoofed, appearing to be a Verizon cellular customer -- but the actual message was relayed to T-Mobile's SMS gateway by a server in the .ru TLD :-) .

Moral: there ain't necessarily no ANI to use for tracing back the offending ... .

And if ANI *were* present, but spoofed, whom would you prosecute, exactly?

Cheers, -- tlvp

Reply to
tlvp

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