SMS Spam, are you a victim, Or a culprit?


OFTMost people seem to use SMS [short messaging services], Text messaging on their mobiles these days, regardless of their device or mobile OS. Service providers have also noticed tat it can be a great marketing tool to entice a captive audience. If your service provider has direct access to your device [as they do] they can send you any material without any negotiation.  The spam or scam material, comes as standard SMS and it’s usually stuff you can do without.

What I wonder about, is the fact that I never agreed to accept random, or structured promotional posts on my mobile, but I get them.

What’s the best way to warn people about SMS scammers? According to the UK Office of Fair Trading, it’s behaving like one. The OFT sent out text messages on the 15th of February saying "Urgent! U may have won £1k cash with ‘2 Good 2 B True’." These were followed up later with a second text explaining the scam.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think this should be done without permission.

An innovative way to get the message across or patronising the intended audience? Did you get one?

This doesn’t ring true as a truly user supportive service to me. What do you think?

via ShinyShiny

Share and Enjoy:
  • E-mail this story to a friend!
  • Print this article!
  • Facebook
  • Digg
  • TwitThis
  • StumbleUpon
  • Google Bookmarks
  • del.icio.us

Related posts:

  1. PDF SPAM – SPAM to the Next Level
  2. USA Today – Delivering the latest news via SMS
  3. Update: SMS Chat from Vito
  4. SMS-Chat from Vito Technology
  5. Textr – Lots of Windows Mobile SMS Texting Features

More in Views | 2 Comments

2 Comments

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.


dgoldring
Feb 20, 2008

Nothing like spam you have to pay for.

doug


spmwinkel
Feb 21, 2008

I think it would have been better if they’d turn it around: first warn that they were going to send a sample spam message, and then send the example spam/scam message.

Luckily I never had a SMS message of this kind, perhaps these scams are not yet such a problem in the Netherlands.

Leave a Reply

Comment