Beginning towards 1:30 pm EST on November 11, my T-Mobile cellular handset started receiving regular MMS spam: text messages touting organ-enhancement, pain-relief, e-d, and other "nutri-ceutical" products, as well as "reproduction" timepieces, jewelry, and fashion accessories; linking to web-sites in the *.ru TLD; and arriving spasmodically at an average rate of roughly one per hour until 9:55 pm EST on November 12.
Calls to T-Mobile CC revealed that CC was being swamped (half-hour hold times and longer) with customer inquiries. Even front-line agents were aware of the problem, and had already been authorized to assure anxious customers that T-Mobile would be voiding any standard tariff charges for these spam MMS messages. (My plan, for example, envisages 30 MMS messages per billing period, in and/or out, before per-message surcharges apply, and here I had an actual
31 spam MMSes arrive in just the 32-hour period indicated above!)Higher tier agents sought to minimize the impact of the current deluge by reconfiguring users' email filter settings to block messages for whom the user was merely a "Bcc:" recipient, but ran smack into the wall, of T-Mobile's own erection, that the relevant T-Mobile EmailFilters.aspx Active Server database manipulation page has been throwing 500-style server errors -- despite the issuance of numerous Trouble Tickets, Helpdesk Tickets, and even Master Tickets -- since mid-summer 2009.
Fortunately, the T-Mobile Engineering crew seems to have stemmed the spam tide for now -- or else the Russian bot-masters behind it have just turned it off :-) .
Cheers from the T-Mo trenches, -- tlvp