TEXTING. IF YOU HAD ASKED AMERICANS WHAT THAT WORD MEANT 15 years ago, most would have been short for words. Now the definition of texting, even though still not listed in some dictionaries, is embedded in our brains and the words are piling up. Whether you text occasionally, you hate receiving them or if you’re a quick-fingered teen who can’t live without it; texting is right there in your purse or your pocket beeping at you.
And if we’ve caught on to a trend, so have the bad guys.
Verizon Wireless said its customers sent nearly 58 billion text messages coast to coast in the first quarter of 2008 and with that much phone-to-phone communication going on, you don’t want it getting into the wrong hands.
Text messages are now another outlet for spammers, predators or hackers to pollute your phone with unwanted junk, a problem that Jeffrey Nelson, spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said the carrier saw coming.
“We learn a lot of lessons from the Internet,” Nelson said. “This stuff is coming and to allow an individual to take control of their texting lives, it was important to do this in the first place.”
That said, Verizon Wireless has offered a text blocking program for a couple years, providing subscribers with different protective options. Customers can block messages from up to 15 specific sources by entering e-mail addresses, domain names or wireless nicknames. Nelson said most of the spam messages originate from the Internet and those affected can catch those addresses and put a stop to it.
At the source
Certain carriers such as Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA Inc. are also going after some of the spammers to stop certain messages from ever arriving. Nelson said the spam they intersect ranges anywhere from Bahamas vacations to hate speech with a big chunk of them coming from Eastern Europe.
“If you saw it or your 12-year-old daughter saw it, it would horrify you,” Nelson said.
T-Mobile USA spokeswoman Amanda Ginther said the carrier is also going on the defensive side and has filters built into the network to help detect and block spam texts sent to customers’ handsets that originate from Internet IP addresses.
“These filters are updated on an ongoing basis, including vigilant monitoring for new emerging schemes,” Ginther said.
T-Mobile USA also offers a text block service through its Web site and Deepa Karthikeyan, wireless data analyst at Current Analysis, said many carriers have caught on. Karthikeyan said besides Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA; Alltel Communications L.L.C., AT&T Mobility, Helio L.L.C., Sprint Nextel Corp., Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA Inc. all carry some sort of text blocking feature customers can set up over their phone or on the carrier Web sites.
Consumer costs
Not only are you wasting your time sifting through spam texts and having a mess of an inbox, you’re paying for it. Karthikeyan said users are typically charged an average of 15 cents per text message, whether they want it or not, frustrating customers and carriers.
Nelson said Verizon Wireless wants nothing more than to solve this text-spamming issue mainly because it costs Verizon Wireless even more money to answer the customer service call and help an angry user paying for promotional texts.
Other wallet breaking complaints tend to come from angry parents, mortified by their son’s or daughter’s text message use, Nelson said.
“Occasionally you’d get horrifying calls from parents saying ‘Johnny has discovered text messaging and now we have a huge bill’,” Nelson said. What can be even more frustrating is when those messages are not the type a teen wants to receive or asked for. Now in the days of Facebook and MySpace, teens and young cell- phone users are easy targets.
“There seems to be a difference in privacy expectations among more mature vs. more young customers,” Nelson said. “People put their mobile number out there and all sorts of crawling engines can grab that number and dial.”
“We want to make sure if a kid is getting bullied in a new high- tech way, we can protect them,” Nelson added.
