Spammers target cell phones

Some providers are trying to guard against the problem.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
No longer just the scourge of computer inboxes, spam has begun trickling into cell phones.
Sometimes it's a text message that pops up on your cell-phone screen, advertising lewd or dubious services, or new offers from your cell-phone provider. Other times it's a harmless message transmitted via the short-range technology known as Bluetooth, inviting passers-by into a nearby coffee shop.
So far, it seems to be mostly a minor annoyance. "I just delete them," said Colin Powers, 20, a student at the Art Institute of Philadelphia, who has received a few unsolicited text messages hawking "special offers" at Web sites.
And while Christian Petrucci, 33, a lawyer, said he has not received spam on his cell phone yet, he thinks it could explode the way Internet spam has.
"Spam wasn't an e-mail problem a few years ago," he said.
Is cell-phone spam likely to evolve into something that big, something approaching the scale of e-mail spam?
What experts say
Experts are divided.
"Stay tuned. We, too, will get swamped," said David Farber, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University and former chief technologist at the Federal Communications Commission.
Wireless providers are aware of the potential for a problem, but they say they are guarding against it. "We've been successful at beating it back," said Sheldon Jones, spokesman for Verizon Wireless. "But like your home computer, there are some that get through."
In Japan, where text messaging is more popular than talking on cell phones, wireless spam was a huge problem a few years ago. NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest cell-phone provider, said spam text messages overloaded its systems at times in 2000 and 2001, freezing some customers' screens and spreading programs that caused some phones to automatically dial Japan's equivalent of 911.
The company eventually brought the problem under control by installing security and spam-filtering software on its network and in its phones.
John Summers, global director for managed security at Pennsylvania-based Unisys Corp., said U.S. cell-phone users were unlikely to face similar problems, for several reasons:
U.S. cell-phone customers do comparatively little text messaging. According to Forrester Research Inc., 17 percent of U.S. cell-phone customers were sending text messages as of the third quarter of last year. By comparison, NTT DoCoMo said about 80 percent of its customers use text messaging.
Trying to prevent it
U.S. cell-phone companies have learned from the mistakes of carriers in other countries and have installed technology to prevent spam and viruses from reaching cell phones.
It's easier to detect cell-phone spammers than e-mail spammers. Cell-phone messages come from one of six carriers, as opposed to thousands of traditional Internet service providers.
Text messages sent from one carrier to another may not go through, because the networks are not always technically compatible.
It's expensive to send cell-phone spam. Most carriers charge between 8 cents and 12 cents per message, while sending spam over the Internet is virtually free. And receiving text messages costs, too -- typically 2 cents to 3 cents per message.
Cell-phone companies have a strong financial interest in keeping text-message spam under control, Summers said, because text-messaging represents a potentially lucrative revenue stream. They have been encouraging "texting," particularly among teenagers and young adults.
"That's the pot of gold they want to get to," Summers said. "If things like spamming or message abuse start making that unpopular, it damages that opportunity."
In most cases, customers can ask their cellular providers to remove charges incurred from spam. Verizon Wireless, for instance, said it will credit accounts for messages customers identify as spam.
And cell-phone companies say they monitor call and text volumes continuously for spam.