SMS Spam

So David Pogue has this piece on his blog about cell phone spam. I clicked on it and learned something cool — you can turn off text message spam by disallowing SMS the originates from the internet.

But whither Twitter and Orbitz? And other cool stuff that depends on the ability of IMAP to send SMS? You can apparently give your phone an alias, which you only make public to the services you want to have it. Pogue heard about the possibility of doing this stuff from an AT&T rep, but it turns out that other carriers have it as well.

As it turns out, Verizon Wireless offers these features, too. Sprint and T-Mobile don’t go quite as far, but they do offer some text-spam filtering options. Here’s how you find the controls for each company:

• AT&T: Log in at mymessages.wireless.att.com. Under Preferences, you’ll see the text-blocking and alias options. Here’s also where you can block messages from specific e-mail addresses or Web sites.
• Verizon Wireless: Log in at vtext.com. Under Text Messaging, click Preferences. Click Text Blocking. You’re offered choices to block text messages from e-mail or from the Web. Here again, you can block specific addresses or Web sites. (Here’s where you set up your aliases, too.)
• Sprint: No auto-blocking is available at all, but you can block specific phone numbers and addresses. To get started, log in at www.sprint.com. On the top navigation bar, click My Online Tools. Under Communication Tools, click Text Messaging. On the Compose a Text Message page, under Text Messaging Options, click Settings & Preferences. In the text box, you can enter a phone number, email address or domain (such as Comcast.net) that you want to block.
• T-Mobile: T-Mobile doesn’t yet offer a “block text messages from the Internet” option. You can block all messages sent by e-mail, though, or permit only messages sent to your phone’s e-mail address or alias, or create filters that block text messages containing certain phrases. It’s all waiting when you log into www.t-mobile.com and click Communication Tools.

But what about call spam?

I’m not referring to it as “telemarketing,” because the thing I’m dealing with isn’t actually a person trying to get me to buy/do something like normal telemarketing. It’s just a scam. And they call my line and my wife’s a lot — at this point we’ve each gotten the call 4 or 5 times. How do you get rid of this? Where do they get my number?

I’m worried about this phenomenon because it has no obvious solution like the SMS thing above does. You would never want to limit your contact via phone number to people who had it already, but with SMS you can see why that makes sense. Honestly, what’s to prevent this from becoming as prevalent as spam? Low ROI? Sure… for now. But with advances in telephony tech, you could see it becoming a big problem eventually.

Hopefully this is one of those things I make a semi-prediction on that turns out to just be completely wrong. This is one instance in which I’d welcome having that happen to me…