Wireless Spam?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Recently I've begun to get spam on my e-mail equipped cellphone. Now, you have to realize I took every precaution to make sure this never happened: I have never used that e-mail address anywhere; I have an alias set up on my server that forwards to it; and I only use the alias for my own personal use. However, the spam I'm getting is not going through my server's alias to get to the phone -- I checked the logs. Multiple complaints to Voicestream's abuse address have not even evoked a response. The only way I can figure they got my address is either: Voicestream supplied it to the spammer; or the spammer entered all Voicestream phone numbers in e-mail format. Either way, I'm pissed at Voicestream. Also, I know for a fact I'm not the only Voicestream customer having this problem. The guys at work are getting the exact same spam at the exact same time. Is anyone else having this problem now? It's enough to make me drop my e-mail address on my phone. Could you imagine deleting 80 spams a day from your cellphone?"

In Japan...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an epidemic in Japan with regards to cell phones. Cell phone usage is only charged to outbound calls, providing an incentive not to call anyone (but I digress...)

There is a problem wherein spammers (for lack of a better word) are calling cell phones at random and hanging up immediately. This results in a "Missed Call" type of message with an included phone number. Phone owners are thusly tricked into calling the number back and subsequently charged outrageous fees for calling a 900-style number.

It's a big problem over here. When I got my phone, I had 3 calls like that in the first day.

Charges have always been only on outbound calls

[hackwrench]

on long distance calls in the U.S. on regular phones. On cellular phones they have been paying both ways, but increasingly on cell phones long distance and local are treated the same. They have recently been offering free long distance for a monthly fee on regular phones.

Re:Charges have always been only on outbound calls

[ddeyoung]

Maybe I'm off base (comment marked funny?), but he may be referring to the fact that in many markets, the person calling the cell phone is charged for the call. The numbers are easily identified by the prefix so the caller knows that they're being charged. Also, if I'm not mistaken, these markets have a much higher market penetration in general (e.g. Greece).

Re:In Japan...

[Technician]

Ask if your phone mail can be protected by a PIN. If enough people ask for the feature, they may get the idea to provide one before the competetion does. E-mail sent to your phone without the PIN gets discarded.

If you think -that's- bad,

[Mordant]

just wait until you start getting spam via your major home appliances:

http://www.energy.whirlpool.com/pressrelease_06. ht ml

Re:If you think -that's- bad,

[jo42]

Or a DDoS attack.

Or someone hacks your fridge and turns it off.

Or your ReplayTV is hacked and used to store kiddie pr0n.

The Simple Explanation...

[Anonymous Coward]

your ISP is selling out just like others.

[PhoneNumber]@telcoISP.com == spam

[Kris_J]

If you're using any service that includes a "free/bonus" email address of your mobile phone number @ someserver.com then you're lucky you haven't been spammed before. Same problem with ICQ email. Base ten, no letters, doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to auto-generate a couple of million probably-valid addresses.

You can only safely forward email to a mobile phone if your service never uses the temping #@telco.com format, even "internally". My ISP is also my mobile phone provider and they go directly from my private email address to their SMS server without an extra email-2-SMS gateway. A private address I have masked by sneakemail and filtered by spamcop. (I can also cap the number of SMSes sent per 24 hours.)

Sprint wireless spam

[The Karma Whore Guy]

As of this morning SprintPCS still officially refuses to handle their already existent SMS spam problem. They will not pass headers to end users. They provide only message 'from' and 'subject' headers, which does little good. Of course we all know how easily forged envelope headers are, so it matters little. Their SMS gateway still strips the relay IP information, and their web to SMS gateway doesn't pass an IP from the sender to the recipient either.

In short Sprint is forcing themselves to be the only ascertainable point of contact for the end user. Their official suggestion? Change your phone number and the messages will stop. They do claim that they will try to identify the sender and ask them to stop, but with Sprints track record as a publicly identifiable smashups that is hard to belive.

This is the way the world ends...

[hackwrench]

Not with a bang, not with a wimper but with flawed products and poor customer service.

Re:This is the way the world ends...

[Profane Motherfucker]

TS Eliot is best saved until after lunch.

The mornings are best left to Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the customer service fight.

The first I'd heard of this was today...

[boopus]

I had thought about this but hadn't actualy heard of it happening untill someone in the lab I was working in was complaining about getting offers for free DVD's on their cell phone just today.

The only real way to stop this is going to be getting the phone companies to stray from the [e-mail]. Hopefully they'll catch on. It'll be far more work for them to offer you an user name instead of just using your phone numnber, so we'll see what solution they come up with. They *could* start filtering any server trying to send more than two or three messages an hour, but we'll see how that goes.

At least with my plan I don't get charged for incoming messages, but they're a high priority interupt. If I start getting spam I'll just turn off the message beep. The moral of the story? Spam sucks.

Re:The first I'd heard of this was today...

[eugene ts wong]

The only real way to stop this is going to be getting the phone companies to stray from the [e-mail]...They *could* start filtering any server trying to send more than two or three messages an hour, but we'll see how that goes.

I hope they do that too. I wish they would also ban all messages from all places by default and give you a web interface to allow who you want to come in.

Threaten Em! (legally!)

[CyberQ]

Where did the spam come from? If it originated from a serious company and not some obscure {p0rn|make_money_fast|get_beautifull_painlessly|lo ose_50_pounds _in_1_day} outlet on the net then you could try this: Contact them with a very a polite e-mail (or in case of SMS spam: SMS) and inquire about a snail mail adress that you may use to serve a cease and desist order. The inquiry alone is often enough to end spam from that source.

You should also check if the terms of use of your service provider allows the company to distribute your e-mail address. Sometimes one forgets to check the conveniently hard to see "I don't want any valuable unsolicited consumer advice" boxes.

Snuff out spam

[Kisai]

I do hope that the telcos realize that they are impairing adoption of wireless e-mail as long as two things still happen:

1. Billing for messages recieved (when most of them are going to be spam)
2. Not billing the e-mail sender.

What needs to happen is that the telcos, maybe even the postal system needs to create an unique GUID-like system that generates e-mail addresses in the format like FFFFFFFF-FFFFFFFF-FFFFFFFF-FFFF
Of which the last two bytes can be used for identification/area, kinda like area-codes, but not base-10.

Then charge money for access to the directory service that resolves the GUID to something like [e-mail]

So in order for spammers to mass-gather and send spam it would cost a fortune. Bulk-mail to specific target groups is made easier as well, since someone could pay a few thousand dollars and lookup an entire cities worth of e-mails. Instead of the stupid "10 billion e-mails on CD for 449$" type of crap seen in spam, which is neither targeted, nor regionally correct (Canadians, Austrailians, and Europeans get so much spam for junk from the USA isn't not funny.)

Then there is also a magic flag that we add called "disable bulk mail" and whenever a bulk query is called to the directory, e-mails with the flag set are not returned.

Also allow for opting-out of reciving e-mail from entire countries, finally, get rid of all that american spam.

Then opt-in your friends (the "only directly recieve e-mail from those on your list" feature.) so they can contact you directly.

It could be done, but I doubt the telcos want to pony up the money to do it. They are in the market for making money, and making money means billing the reciever for all the spam they recieve.

Just Say NO

[ThePilgrim]

For the last six of months I have not recieved any thing other than SPAM through my phone email. As I don't use it to send mail I canceled the option last week.

If more of us start canceleing our accounts, the mobile companies will start to take notice, especally when they keep getting 'I get to mutch SPAM' as the reasion for disconecting.

My mobile company charged me a monthley fee for the service. A monthly fee they are no longer recieving.

Data Spam and DOS Attacks

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently had a similar problem which resulted in a DOS attack against my 7110. I recieved a data call every 1 minute from and 'unknown number'. Obviously a modem configured to phone my number over and over again. This resulted in calls being lost and my phone ringing itself to death.

When I contacted my provider they said and I quote! "there is nothing we can do. They will stop when they realise their mistake!", Oh yeh - what if this is somebody determined to annoy me or even somebodies home PC thats been hacked.

When are the mobile and phone providers going to realise that what happens on the Internet today will happen on the mobile network tomorrow...

Almost as funny as the time my providers, support engineer told me to disable my "fir wall" so the alerts I was getting from Code Red infected machines will stop being displayed...

regards -Sliver-

Re:Data Spam and DOS Attacks

[RockDoctor]

A friend had a similar problem: he'd configured one of the machines (his desktop?) on the small office network he administered so it would send him a "Help!" SMS if it couldn't see the networks {main servers, DNS boxes, whatever}. A few weeks later, my friend was a couple of hundred miles out of town (for an extended party) when The Boss did something inadvisable and the network went to ratshit showing all the usual suspects of network hell. The trusty desktop box picks up it's modem and starts SMSing "Help". Every 15 seconds when it sees there to be problems. Oh dear.
Naturally, when the phone's battery died, there were no chargers available. IIRC a land-line connection had to be used eventually to get the system sane again. First operation on returning to work was to LART The Boss; then put a bit more intelligence into the "Help!" scripts; then to get a second phone charger. Lessons were learned.

Wireless Political spam

[Craig Maloney]

The only spam I've received on my wireless device (knock on particle board) was a spam in the 2000 election from George W. Bush's minions asking me to vote for him. I was so livid in receiving this. He didn't change my voting convictions any, but he sure did piss me off in the whole process.