The talk is about spam again — not email spam, but spam sent via SMS. Also known as text message spam. whether SMS spam is as big a problem as email spam?
The situation varies around the world — some of this is due to the different views on spam in various cultures, similar to email spam. For example SMS spam in China is much more prevalent than it is in the West, but the locals are far more tolerant of it than Westerners are.
A widely-quoted statistic on SMS spam is from Ferris Research, who estimated that 1.5 billion spammed text messages were received in the U.S. during 2008. That sounds like a big number, but a year is a long time and there are tens of millions of subscribers in the country.
I work that out as about one spam message per person per quarter, on average — some people will get more, some less. It’s occasionally annoying, but incomparable to the email spam problem, where a typical user might receive hundreds of spam messages per day (unless they have a good spam filter, of course!)
So why is this? How come email spam is a 5,000,000% bigger problem than SMS spam? It mainly boils down to three related factors…
Cost of Service
Email is free. Mobile phone service isn’t. To be more precise, the marginal cost of sending email is zero, but sending a text message costs of the order of $0.10 (much less in quantity).
Shady marketers and criminals love email. They can send email for free, either by stealing service from innocent users via botnets, or by using so-called “pink contracts” (where ISPs turn a blind eye to a customer’s spamming ways).
If the marginal cost per message is zero, who cares if 99% of your email is filtered before reaching your victims’ inboxes? Let’s say you send a million messages advertising fake ED drugs and 1% gets delivered. Of that, 1% results in a sale. That’s 100 sales, each of which might generate, say, a $10 affiliate revenue; $1,000 in total. So, in order to make a profit, your average cost to send each message needs to be less than one tenth of a cent.
However, in the SMS world, the privilege of sending bulk SMS is reserved for those with money and a valid contract. Bulk SMS might cost a few cents per message to send: a couple of orders of magnitude more than email.
Of course, spammers can and do uses stolen credit cards to buy service, but the providers are quick to shut down such abuse.
- If you receive a SPAM text message, please let your carrier know as soon as possible. Make sure to include the message, time and phone number.
- In general, we recommend wireless users to make sure their purchase is from a trusted source before them sign-up for a product or service.
