Overview

Everyone hates spam, whether it appears in their inbox or on their mobile phone. The main problem with mobile spam is that consumers have to pay for receiving unwanted premium text messages, and some scammers have gone as far as to trick users into making premium rate calls from their phones, or to attempt to change the phone device settings. The growing sophistication of spammers has led to an increased amount ofmobile spam. Spammers are now venturing beyond the world of e-mail, and are sending messages to phones that are foiling anti-spam technologies which were developed to combat e-mail spam. The operators are becoming wise to spamming techniques, however, and rules and regulations are gradually being put into place and enforced. This will be covered later in this chapter.

Efforts to combat mobile spam face a number of challenges. Spammers are clever enough to set up their operations overseas, where anti-spam laws do not apply, and it is only recently that anti-spam companies have begun to understand wireless networks well enough to be able to combat mobile spam. According to a recent study published by the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, operators who don t figure out how to fight mobile spam risk losing their customers, as most customers blame their operator when they receive unsolicited text messages.

In the UK code of practice for the self-regulation of new forms of content on mobiles, published 19 January 2004, the main mobile operators in the UK (Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile,...