March 17, 2015

Text Message Spam

I used to work on cell phone design. But that was 15 years ago, and I was working on hardware drivers and never really spent any time on any of the high level protocols. What we were building back then would be by modern standards considered a "dumb phone". The display was dot matrix, and the keyboard was a standard phone keyboard. We didn't support things like SMS.

Since I left the industry things have changed a lot. Like really A Lot.

My phone, which is two and a half years old by now, still fills me with amazement. It's a "smartphone" (a Droid DNA, which is a proprietary Verizon version of the HTC Butterfly) and it has a touch screen over a 1920*1080 color display, among other astounding things. And, of course, it does all the modern stuff like send and receive messages.

I don't use that feature much. Actually, I don't use the phone much. I got it as a solution to the "I've fallen and I can't get up" problem after my stroke, and thankfully so far I haven't needed it. (I'm proud to say that I haven't lost my balance and fallen even once since my stroke. Not even a single time.)

But I do get text messages occasionally. Two or three times a year I get text message spam. I got one this afternoon.

They've been porn come-ons, naturally enough. But what I don't understand is why I'm not getting several of those a day, or at the very least a few per week.. Does Verizon have an extremely active and effective spam filter running, and what I've received is the extremely rare ones who slip past the filter?

It isn't any secret which banks of phone numbers belong to each of the wireless phone companies, after all, and it ain't that tough to send an SMS to every phone number in the block. If you can send one, you can send 10,000. (Can't you?)

I don't for a moment believe the spammers are practicing self control. (As if.) So I assume that they are sending millions of spam messages per year to Verizon, and that nearly all of those are going into the bit bucket. Is so?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:29 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 376 words, total size 2 kb.

1 The last time I was doing anything related to originating texts from a computer, you either had to have a fairly expensive account that would be monitored for volume and shut down quickly if you were spamming with it, or you had to rely on free servers that would generally throttle you to something like 10 messages a day, and 100 total, before that IP was banned. While I'm sure it's easier now than it was 8 years or so ago, I'm sure that the basic concepts are still the same, and it takes some level of approval from a carrier to get your message onto the network, you don't just get to put up your own server and start sending packets.

Posted by: David at March 17, 2015 06:59 PM (+TPAa)

2 If it's really being throttled that severely, then the other side of the coin is why anyone bothers doing it at all?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at March 17, 2015 07:32 PM (+rSRq)

3 The same reason any spam happens... risk vs reward.  If you get one profitable bite on something that cost you approximately $0.00 because you're using some other guy's internet-connected fridge to do your advertising for you, you won! 

I came home to an answering machine message (yup, still got a landline) a few weeks ago... "If you or a loved one with $medical_condition took $drug and suffered $side_effect, call $shysters at $number now!" I assume it was an mp3 file delivered by VOIP from somebody's botnet. I can't imagine a hit rate over 1:10,000,000 for whatever obscure disease it was, but for zero cost, why not be a sociopath about it?  (It was probably a redirect to a $20/minute phone sex line anyway... or a social-engineering identity-theft scheme.)

Posted by: Mikeski at March 17, 2015 08:57 PM (aLP9q)

4 I imagine the costs came down, but Block Messaging used to be really, really expensive.  The Phone Companies not being big on charity for that type of stuff.

I remember during the 2008 Presidential Campaign that Obama's campaign SMS'd out that Biden was the VP selection.  The commentary estimated it cost them around $2 million to do that. So Block SMS was, for a time, came with a huge charge.

The work-around is to use the Email-SMS feature of the carrier's phone block.  But since there's at least 1 major interlink connection between the either the Telco or Internet systems and the Cellphone network, it saves the Phone Companies a lot of money to have aggressive filtering at the interconnect.  

We get about 1/2 of our land-lines calls as illegal calls, but the most interesting one came in a few weeks ago.  It was claiming the power company was going to raise rates by 12% next month.  I'll give them credit for being clever.

Posted by: sqa at March 17, 2015 10:03 PM (Vpjs1)

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