Spam nuisance spreads to text messaging

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

It seems like everyone with a wireless device is communicating via text messaging these days.

Unfortunately, this includes spammers.

For a few days in late August, wireless customers across the country received an unsolicited bulk text message on their cell phones and pagers pitching the penny stock of a Nevada company.

For many wireless customers, this was their first experience with text message spam.

The message read:

This one is put on Radar
Sym: FDKE
Fredericks Entertainment, Inc.
See all the volume, GET IN
It’ll be $2 within a week

“It’s annoying because I have to pay for it,” said Erik Englund of Seattle, who doesn’t have a text message plan. Until last week, he thought cell phones were spam-free. Not anymore.

Another victim of the spam, Bill Rice, was so upset that he went to a Verizon store, canceled his text message service and blocked all incoming text messages. Verizon is one of the few major wireless companies that let you do that.

"I was just appalled and very annoyed,” Rice, of Seattle, said.

Verizon Wireless claims to block up to 50,000 spam text messages per day. “One spam message is too many as far as we’re concerned,” said Georgia Taylor, Verizon Wireless representative. “We take great lengths in the way of filters and technology to actually block most of these.”

How did the spammers get the numbers of the wireless devices attacked? Taylor says it was random dialing.

How many of the spam messages promoting Fredericks Entertainment were delivered? If the wireless companies know, they won’t say. I can tell you Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and U.S Cellular customers across the country got them.

Who to contact If you receive investment-related spam, forward the offending message to .

Sprint representative Caroline Semerdjian said there were two simultaneous spam attacks that overloaded the company’s spam filters and allowed many of the junk messages to get through.

“These guys are constantly trying and testing the water to find a way to get around the filters,” says Howard Schmidt of R&H Consulting in Seattle.

Schmidt, a former White House cyber security consultant, is concerned about the whole issue of attacks on wireless devices. “As we’ve become more hardened in the desktops and the servers, the next logical place for those with criminal intent to go to is the mobile world,” he says.

What were spammers up to?
Last month’s text message blitz was just the latest twist on the traditional pump-and-dump stock scheme. Here is how it works: Scammers buy a penny stock and send out spam to pump up the price. Once the price jumps, the scammers dump it for a quick profit. Everyone who comes to the party late gets clobbered as the stock plummets.

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