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WASHINGTON - THE spam messages that have long plagued e-mail inboxes are now finding victims through a much more personal route: the cellphone.
Text messages have become the latest tool for advertisers and scammers to target consumers.
But unlike junk e-mail that can be deleted with the click of a button, text-message spam costs money for the person who receives it and chips away at the mobile phone's aura of privacy.
'It's so annoying because I get charged every time I get one,' said Virginia victim Ryan Williams, 27, who receives half a dozen spam messages a day.
They ask him to download ring tones or visit questionable sites over his phone's Internet connection, or urge him to subscribe to horoscopes or sports-score updates.
Mr Williams downloaded a program that was supposed to block text messages from numbers not stored in his phone's contact list, but the junk messages still get through.
Spammers even make the messages appear as if they are coming from his own number, so his wireless carrier cannot block them.
'Spam e-mail usually goes right into my spam filter, but the texts are there on my phone, and they just keep coming,' he said.
More than a billion text messages are sent every day in the United States.
US consumers are expected to receive about 1.5 billion spam text messages this year, up from 1.1 billion last year and 800 million in 2006, according to Ferris Research, a San Francisco market research firm.
To get cellphone numbers, spammers harvest phone numbers from databases or hack into the records of legitimate companies that have permission to send text messages.
Cellphone companies are ramping up efforts to shut them out by taking spammers to court and using more sophisticated filters.
Compared with spam e-mail, junk text messages are seen as more invasive because the cellphone is more intimate and used for one-on-one communication - a quality marketers are trying to utilise.
But while cellphone spam is often a nuisance, more malicious messages can lead to a new form of fraud called smishing - a variation of a spam e-mail attack known as phishing.
Smishing attacks, called such because text messages are also known as SMS messages, disguise themselves as legitimate messages from e-commerce or financial sites such as eBay, PayPal or banks, and seek to dupe consumers into revealing their account numbers or passwords.
Maryland massage therapist Lori Small was told in a spam SMS that her bank account was overdrawn.
The spammers asked for the last four digits of her social security number to verify her ownership of the account.
'I couldn't believe how sneaky it was,' she said. 'I mean, e-mail spam is one thing, but this is my personal phone number...and now someone out there has one more clue about who I am.'
THE WASHINGTON POST
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