Andrew Ferguson dot NET

I received my first ever piece of cell phone spam the other day. I was rather incredulous about getting it, but one can’t deny the fact that it was sitting there on my cellphone.

The FCC has had a law banning the spamming of cellphones for a little over three years now. The law is supposed to “outlaw all unauthorized text messages to mobile phones and pagers unless the owner has given permission.” [1]

My text was a pump and dump scheme that promised the stock to be an “easy tripler [sic]” and stating that “It’ll be $2 within a week.”

The brevity of the message leads me to believe that the spam was targeted at cellphones. I’m actually surprised that I haven’t received more text spams, considering the small finite set of cellphone numbers there are and the ease at which they can be spam’d. I won’t go into the details, but I could very easily write a 10 line PHP program that could spam all phones in the US.

Hopefully this won’t become a recurring issue…other I might have to break my collapsible bat out¹.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/04/HNbancellphonespam_1.html

¹This is actually just a figure of speech. I don’t own a collapsible bat (or a regular bat for that matter, except for the one I have in my bedroom in Seattle). The point being, just please don’t spam my cell phone anymore.

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