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A spam renaissance coming?

How many items of spam do you get each day?

There was a time when my inbox was almost worthless to me because of the levels of unsolicited advertising emails that flooded it on a continuous basis -- but my, how times have changed.

These days, largely thanks to ensuring that my most used addresses aren't exposed to the public domain and because spam filtering is now so very effective, email has once again become my primary electronics communications mechanism.

The work being done by teams who regularly shut down the huge botnets spammers now rely on for their broadcasts is also invaluable in the war against the endless dross that once made the Net far less useful than it now is.

However, I fear we may be about to suffer a new torrent of unwanted advertising.

This time it won't be your computer's inbox that fills to overflowing with pitches for manly-member-maximisers or payday loans.

No, spammers are moving with the times and now they're setting their sights on the mobile marketplace.

If you thought that unwanted emails was a pain in the backside, wait until you start getting SMS messages and calls at all times of the day and night.

Of course this is totally illegal here in NZ -- although I wish someone would tell Vodafone that, for they seem to think it's okay to interrupt me with their "offers" on a semi-regular basis.

And it's the interruption that is the real bugger with mobile spam.

Email is something that just sits in your mailbox until you clear it out. There are very few of us who drop what we're doing to read an incoming email in the way that most people will quickly check their mobile every time the SMS tone sounds -- or answer calls even if engaged in a face-to-face conversation with someone else.

SMS messages and voice calls are intrusive. They demand instant attention -- and that's the thing that spammers love about them.

Spam emails are easily identified and dismissed without a second-thought. With an SMS or voice call you don't know it's spam until you've read it or answered it -- by then, the spammer has been able to impart their message. You've been "pwnd"!

Of course spamming by SMS or voice is a lot more expensive than bulk-emailing -- but then again, it's also a hell of a lot more effective. Also, the continuing fall in telecommunications costs mean that it's now becoming economically viable to use mobile spam as a way of hawking your wares.

So how do mobile spammers avoid being caught and punished for their crimes?

Simple -- they operate from countries where telecoms services are cheap and laws against such things are weak or non-existent.

Check out this story from the Daily Mail for an example of what I mean.

Maybe your mobile provider can filter SMS messages or calls from specific known-to-be-spammer numbers but that's going to be a futile game of whackamole.

Perhaps we'll all eventually be running "whitelists" on our mobiles so that txts and calls from unknown numbers will, just like email spam, be dumped into a "look at this later" folder -- rather than distracting us from whatever we're doing at the time they're received.

We're already seeing rapidly rising levels of phone-spam here in NZ -- the worst offenders being those silly Indian scammers who call to warn us that they have been alerted to viruses on your computer. How long before we start getting calls offering us herbal Viagra, porn or whatever else can be sold for a buck?

But never mind -- once the UN seize control of the internet they'll pass endless resolutions forbidding this kind of thing and nobody will dare cross them!

Sigh!

How many readers have encountered phone or mobile spam from within NZ or from offshore sources and is the trend escalating?

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