jamisonprawn.net

I don’t know if it’s just been me, but I feel like SMS spam messages have increased 10 fold in the last fortnight. SMS spam messages being any SMS message that isn’t personal, and that wasn’t requested - that is, annoying advertising stuff, through to crazy ringtone SMS messages that charge you $1 just to receive them when you haven’t subscribed to anything.

I have felt like the amount of time I spend dealing with this issue with my customers has more than tripled in the last two weeks. And it’s quite frightening, because there is really very little that can be done to stop this, and it’s only going to increase.

Customers will come and say that they’re getting all these SMS messages that they didn’t subscribe to. No problems - I apply a barring on their service that stops all premium messages, both sending and receiving. Problem is that if you ever want to vote for Dancing With The Stars, or SMS a radio station, you can’t. And that’s all fine and dandy for the SMS messages that charge you to receive them… but for just general crap SMS messages that are just normal, and not the subscription ringtone stuff… there’s no way to stop these without completely turning off the ability to receive SMS message.

And it’s even more frustrating when I have to explain to customers that aside from applying barrings, there’s nothing I can do - we don’t control companies that use bulk SMS for unsolicited advertising, and don’t have any authority over them. It’s up to them to report unsolicited SMS things to the ACMA. But unfortunately, as the provider of their mobile, they feel it’s our fault. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 10:49 pm and is filed under nerd central . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.