Saturday, April 30, 2011

Mobile phone spam

(Spam Twitter)-Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. It is described as mobile spamming, SMS spam, text spam or m-spam..
As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000s, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited (and generally unwanted) commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient because, unlike in email, some recipients may be charged a fee for every message received, including spam.
Mobile phone spam is generally less pervasive than email spam, where in 2010 around 90% of email is spam. The amount of mobile spam varies widely from region to region. In North America, much less than 1% of SMS messages were spam in 2010, while in parts of Asia up to 30% of messages were spam.
Criminality and law enforcement

SMS spam is illegal under common law in most jurisdictions as trespass to chattels. Jurisdictions with specific SMS spam regulation and fines include Australia, the EU and others; in the US, violators face substantial costs; in a 2008 settlement, the violator agreed to pay $150 to each spam recipient. In a 2010 class action settlement of Satterfield v Simon & Schuster, a case that reached the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, defendants agreed to pay $175 to each spam recipient. In response to Satterfield, entities who make money sending mobile phone spam formed the Mobile Advocacy Coalition (MAC) to lobby the government to legalize that activity. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has expanded Phone Spam regulations to cover also Voice Spam—mostly in form of prerecorded telemarketing calls—commonly known as robocalls; victims can file a complaint with the FCC. In California, Section 17538.41 of the B&P Code bans text message advertisement. Consumers can sue on an individual or class basis per a private right of action against unfair business practices.
Enforcement in small claims court
The FCC released an order in Aug, 2004 that reiterated that SMS spam messages to cellphones are illegal under the existing Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and also under the CAN-SPAM Act. Each such unsolicited message received without permission entitles the recipient to take the sender to small claims court and collect a minimum of $1 for each violation. They said this in 2003, and reiterated it in 2004: 'In 2003, we released a Report and Order in which we reaffirmed that the TCPA prohibits any call using an automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded message to any wireless telephone number. We concluded that this encompasses both voice calls and text calls, including Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging calls, to wireless phone numbers.
Factors complicating SMS spam reduction

Fighting SMS spam is complicated by several factors, including the lower rate of SMS spam (compared to more abused services such as Internet email) has allowed many users and service providers to ignore the issue, and the limited availability of mobile phone spam-filtering software. Filtering SMS spam at the recipient device would be an imperfect solution in markets where users are charged to receive messages, as the user may still be charged for the message once the provider sent it, even if software on the device blocked it from appearing on the device's display. This problem is not present in most of the world outside the U.S., however, where users are not charged to receive messages.
Countermeasures

There are several actions and strategies that can help reduce SMS spam.
Legal actions can be effective and remunerative.
Many carriers (such as AT&T in the US) allow subscribers to report spam by forwarding the spam messages to short code 7726 (spells SPAM on a traditional phone keypad) (33700 in France). It's reported that 1/2 million spam reports in France resulted in the disconnection of 300 spammers, and many more cease-and-desist orders were sent.
Some spam countermeasures depend on detection, and there are two developments in that area: a GSMA pilot spam reporting program, and the development of Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) standards for mobile spam reporting. In February 2010, the GSM Association has announced a pilot program that will allow subscribers to report SMS spam by forwarding it to short code '7726' which spells "SPAM" on most phones. AT&T Mobility, Korea Telecom, and SFR announced their participation, and a large number of other mobile operators are expected to join after the pilot period.

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