Sunday, August 20, 2006
Sunday, August 20, 2006 MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS TOKYO — A large volume of English-language junk e-mails marketing male impotence drugs has been sent to domestic mobile phones from overseas since late last month. According to the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry, there have been past instances of unsolicited e-mails being sent to mobile phones in Japanese, but this is the first confirmed instance of English-language junk e-mails. Softbank Corp., which runs the Vodafone cell phone service, on Tuesday introduced a system that enables users to block unsolicited e-mails and is urging its mobile phone users to change the settings on their mobile phones to use the system. NTT DoCoMo, Inc. and KDDI Corp., which run the au and Tu-ka services, respectively, are also examining measures to counter English-language junk e-mails. According to Softbank, there are several versions of English-language e-mails touting male impotence drugs. If a user accesses the address on the e-mail, a page is displayed listing the types of drugs and prices. There have been no reports of phishing — in which personal information is falsely obtained — or fraudulent billing scams, but Softbank is warning customers not to access any sites advertised on junk e-mails. E-mails' origins Softbank found that the e-mails are being sent from a number of locations including Asia, Europe and the United States. "We are certain that these e-mails are being sent from an enormous number of computers," a Softbank spokesman said. The ministry's Telecommunications Consumer Policy Division said, "Someone overseas must be combining random characters and numerals to generate "possible" e-mail addresses, and indiscriminately sending e-mail to these addresses." Prof. Masakatsu Morii, of the Faculty of Engineering at Kobe University, said: "It's a wonder there weren't previous cases of junk e-mail being sent in English. I'm afraid that in the future, junk e-mails in many languages will find their way to Japanese mobile phones."