In eight different complaints filed in courts around the United States, the FTC charged 29 defendants with collectively sending more than 180 million unwanted text messages to consumers, many of whom had to pay for receiving the texts. The messages promised consumers free gifts or prizes, including gift cards worth $1,000 to major retailers such as Best Buy, Walmart and Target. Consumers who clicked on the links in the messages found themselves caught in a confusing and elaborate process that required them to provide sensitive personal information, apply for credit or pay to subscribe to services to get the supposedly "free" cards. ======
- A question for our SMS mavens. Per the NY Times article [a]:
"Spam waves have become much more frequent since phone companies began offering unlimited text-messaging plans. Now, spammers buy hundreds of SIM cards, the chips that make cellphones work, allowing them to send a flood of messages and then abandon the phone numbers."
[a]- I'm wondering about that for a couple of reasons. First is that you'd (the spammer, that is) still have to type in each msg into the phone. That kind of limits it to a hundred or so per hour.
- Now that's a big number, but it ain't a BIG number.
Are there computerized phone/sms/SIMcard thingees? I've never seen one but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
That being said, it should be trivial for any legit cellco to rate-limit a subscriber's SMS throughput.
Pretty much all the phone-sms spam I've received has been through an e-mail-to-sms gateway. Which, of course, brings up that whole issue of why the (recipient) cellcos don't offer a "block" of those msgs while still allowing "from another cell phone" ones.
_____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key snipped-for-privacy@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]