SMS Spam

A new technique for luring people to maliscious sites has been going around—via SMS. Cnet reports that the scam is reasonably sophisticated: robots send out an SMS (using the email/SMS gateway) to the effect of "you will be charged $2/message through your phone bill unless you go to this website and cancel the service."

Well, it was only a matter of time before things like this started popping up. I fear for the Email/SMS gateway, on which many innovative developers are forced to rely. Yes, this method of reaching users is a hack, but one developers are forced to use, as there are no reasonable alternatives—short codes are extremely difficult to obtain, and incredibly expensive, especially for start-ups without exhorbitant financial backing.

Hopefully this won't piss off the carriers enough to lock down the gateways. Hopefully the repurcussions won't inadvertantly filter out all the interesting SMS- and MMS-based applications out there—Gumspots, Radar... But really, I've developed a pretty strong cynicism with all things related to the mobile telcos.

SmartMobs had it first.