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Plague of mobile spam hard to fight
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EXPERTS have called for measures to reduce the growing number of junk messages angering China’s mobile phone users.
While mobile phones have made life easier for many, mobile phone users, more than 1.1 billion according to official data, are increasingly disturbed by spam, or junk messages.
A recent report by a rumor-refuting platform said more than 200 billion junk messages annoyed Chinese mobile users in the first half of 2013.
About 59 percent of those junk messages were advertisements, while scam messages, which accounted for only 1.5 percent of the total junk messages, resulted in more than 30 million yuan (US$4.9 million) in losses.
Tencent, a major IT corporation and developer of the online instant messaging service QQ, said 356 million junk SMS messages were reported by its mobile app users in the first half of 2013, 50 million more than in 2012.
The increasing junk messages have become a social problem in China. Experts suggested that the issue be addressed through technical, administrative and legal means.
Big profits
Zhu Wenjun, an official from the telecommunications administration of Beijing, said it is difficult to investigate and crack down on spam, as senders use illegal base stations to send messages instead of using telecom operators’ networks.
Many junk message senders add interference characters in messages and send them through low frequencies to avoid monitoring by operators and regulators.
The current methods of tackling junk messages include the report-and-handle mechanisms of the country’s three mobile operators — China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom — and spam-fighting mobile phone apps developed by IT companies.
Zhou Hanhua, a research fellow with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said China should learn from other countries’ practices to establish a blacklist system to refuse messages from numbers on the list.
Zhou said the technology is already available in China.
Experts found that operators, senders and brokers selling personal information can all benefit from junk messages, which is one reason why they are popular and growing in China.
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