Campaign fails as spamming continues on mobile phones
By Xu Chi |
January 18, 2011, Tuesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
FOUR months after mobile phone operators guaranteed a "beautiful view" - phone displays unspoiled by junk messages, users are still daily plagued by spam messages.
A nationwide real name registration policy took effect on September 1 last year in a bid to tackle phone spam. Police would be able to track down the spammers as a result after the sender's number was reported to them.
The plan sounded great, but it remains just empty talk for now as the spam messages continue to flood in, telling phone users that they have won a million yuan or some other prize that they will never see.
A Shanghai Daily investigation has found that the country's spammers and scammers can still easily escape the policy by purchasing registered phone numbers, downloading message-sending software, and delivering the junk messages to your cell phones to cheat you out of money without the slightest risk of being caught by police.
The fact that the spammers and scammers have shed the shackles of the policy has led to other serious consequences - a boom in phishing websites which look like genuine shopping sites or online banks but are just another way to steal money.
A report from Chinese anti-virus company Rising Co showed they tracked 1.75 million phishing sites in 2010, 11 times the number of 2009.
The report said a total of 44.11 million computer users fell victim to phishing sites with total losses reaching 20 billion yuan.
Mobile phone scam messages played a major role in directing victims to phishing sites by displaying links to them.
A typical message will say: "10,000 yuan in your bank has been consumed lately. Please log on the bank's official website for details." Once the victims click the link, their computers are infected with virus that could steal their bank details.
All that police can do for the moment is to warn people not to believe the scam messages - the servers of the phishing websites are located abroad so can't be tracked down and the real name policy can't find the source of the scams either.
Even if the police do track down the owner of the registered mobile phone number, the owner may simply deny the accusation by saying he had abandoned or lost the number a long time ago.
Abandoned or lost registered phone numbers are now being sold by numerous vendors on the country's leading e-commerce platform, Taobao.com, charging from 89 to 5,988 yuan, depending on the numbers.
Buyers don't have to use Identification cards to register the numbers as the policy requires because the numbers have already been registered by their former users.
A Taobao official told Shanghai Daily the online shops weren't violating the platform's rules.
A nationwide real name registration policy took effect on September 1 last year in a bid to tackle phone spam. Police would be able to track down the spammers as a result after the sender's number was reported to them.
The plan sounded great, but it remains just empty talk for now as the spam messages continue to flood in, telling phone users that they have won a million yuan or some other prize that they will never see.
A Shanghai Daily investigation has found that the country's spammers and scammers can still easily escape the policy by purchasing registered phone numbers, downloading message-sending software, and delivering the junk messages to your cell phones to cheat you out of money without the slightest risk of being caught by police.
The fact that the spammers and scammers have shed the shackles of the policy has led to other serious consequences - a boom in phishing websites which look like genuine shopping sites or online banks but are just another way to steal money.
A report from Chinese anti-virus company Rising Co showed they tracked 1.75 million phishing sites in 2010, 11 times the number of 2009.
The report said a total of 44.11 million computer users fell victim to phishing sites with total losses reaching 20 billion yuan.
Mobile phone scam messages played a major role in directing victims to phishing sites by displaying links to them.
A typical message will say: "10,000 yuan in your bank has been consumed lately. Please log on the bank's official website for details." Once the victims click the link, their computers are infected with virus that could steal their bank details.
All that police can do for the moment is to warn people not to believe the scam messages - the servers of the phishing websites are located abroad so can't be tracked down and the real name policy can't find the source of the scams either.
Even if the police do track down the owner of the registered mobile phone number, the owner may simply deny the accusation by saying he had abandoned or lost the number a long time ago.
Abandoned or lost registered phone numbers are now being sold by numerous vendors on the country's leading e-commerce platform, Taobao.com, charging from 89 to 5,988 yuan, depending on the numbers.
Buyers don't have to use Identification cards to register the numbers as the policy requires because the numbers have already been registered by their former users.
A Taobao official told Shanghai Daily the online shops weren't violating the platform's rules.
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