lafleurcreative

Bad news for text message spammers today. The GSMA, which represents the interests of 800 of the world’s mobile operators in 219 countries, has launched a pilot program to allow consumers to report text message spam.

The GSMA Spam Reporting Service, which is operated on behalf of the GSMA by Cloudmark, Inc., will analyse SMS traffic and identify and aggregate reports of misuse submitted by mobile subscribers of participating networks. It’s pretty simple also, all you have to do is forward the text message spam to the short code 7726, which spells “SPAM” on your mobile phone.

Original article:
Report Text Message Spam to 7726 | SMS Marketing Blog

Thoughts? I personally think this is great, spammers ruin it for the rest of us!

Nick Surran

I couldn't agree more, this is great. And it's a fairly early start before text spam runs rampant like email did. I think we all need to support this and similar efforts in order to keep our industry and reputations as spotless as possible.

I think Lime Cellular is the best white label SMS marketing platform.

MoneyMagnetMagnate

I'm very glad you brought this up - I was just thinking of this problem yesterday...
The last few days, my Father has been receiving several calls and texts, but get this - rather that NO number showing up, it is an incomplete number...(area code)(---) (---) no 4th digit? I was trying to decipher what dialer or method would cause this.

The only real clue to the computer dialer is it calls @ 8:45pm for instance, and the last 3 digits are 845 - or 9:03 - 903 etc...but always no 4th digit. and the only valid numbers being used are the 3 area code numbers...
and when it is not a text and instead a call, when you try dialing the number "cannot be completed as dialed"...

how are they routing the calls without a valid prefix?
Or does this blanket spam all phones in an area code?

And you couldn't report a spammer when there is no number to report...??

Has anyone seen this before? I never have...
Any network engineers or hackers out there want to chime in on this conundrum?

Victoria Gates

That is fantastic! I know that my company Mobile With SMS is very very on the ball about compliance and making sure our clients contact only those customers they have permission from. Used in the right way text message marketing can be a great thing, but abused it is like SPAM email, nobody wants your messages.

Nail Yener

That is really nice. One company keeps sending promotional SMS to me although I haven't subscribed to them. I contacted them about this but they didn't remove me from their list yet. Now I will have an option to report them.

herbaluss

Yes I work for a Large mobile company in Canada and we have had this for a while now.... i guess they forward the SMS to these people. Always wondered if we had a team to dealt with these.
Always some people out there that just got to break the rules to try and make extra bit of loot... but most times those people are using the SMTP platforms otherwise the carrier would just stop the number.

xlfutur1

Yes, sounds great that text spam is already starting to be taken seriously. That's why all outgoing messages for clients need to have "reply STOP to cancel" or something similar. People will join mobile lists if the "offer" is good AND they know they can opt out in the future, but if they start getting too much text spam, then won't even bother IMHO, which will ruin it for everyone.

herbaluss

When I see the complaints they are always from SMTP scripts...

Centurian

Thanks for the news. That will be a game changer and help legitimate ops.

PatrickC

That can only be good news for sms services that operate only on opt-in clause. I wonder if the sms marketing services are liable at all (reponsible) to monitor on their own?

dshipman

I'm so glad I found this thread. Some spammer sent me a text at 4am today, waking me up.

jameswatson2002

This is long overdue, cant stand SMS spam!