Thanks to the team at BBC Lincolnshire. The invited me on the Rod Whiting Breakfast show this morning to talk about the SMS spam.
They were reporting that complaints from text spam have risen dramatically in the last few months and asked me to comment.
I pointed out the following:
– Text messages cost money to send. Our operators have done a good job of closing off the rather suspect text gateways so spammers have to pay to send messages. This means that there’s a lot less around (e.g. compared to other mediums like email)
– Spammers are making money from their spam texts — otherwise they wouldn’t be sending them
– It’s very important to ignore spam messages and to avoid replying or following up with their call-to-action (like phoning a premium rate number for ‘more information’)
– You can forward spam messages for free to your operator — for more information, please check with your specific operator. Vodafone, for instance, will accept spam texts sent to the short code VSPAM (87726) whilst others use SPAM (7726).
– If the spam begins to get crazy, do talk to your operator for advice — you might consider changing your phone number too
– Reputable companies adhere to a code of conduct — you’ll see a note like, ‘to opt out, reply STOP’ or something similar at the end of their text updates