Spam leaves phone users speechless (2)

Easy money
In about six months, the four men convicted in Beijing made more than 100,000 yuan ($15,300) from their spamming business. All they needed were a few computers, dozens of cell phone cards and a few pieces of equipment for group messaging to transmit millions of messages every day.
The equipment can be easily found at electronics markets or online, costing a hundred to a few thousand yuan.
Beijing Boda Technology Center, a company that sells such gear, offers equipment for 6,000 yuan that can use 32 phone cards to send messages simultaneously, said a salesman who answered the phone but did not give his name. Each phone card, costing 25 yuan, can send 700 messages within one hour.
The salesman did the math: "With one piece of equipment, it only costs you 800 yuan to buy phone cards to send 22,400 text messages within an hour. It costs about 0.03 yuan to send one message.
"Many property developers have bought more than 20 such pieces of equipment from us to send advertisements to potential buyers. You can also help other companies to send messages," he said. "You can charge them 0.04 to 0.05 yuan (per message), the standard market price. For each message you send, you can make 0.01 yuan out of it."
The salesman, well aware of the case of the jailed spam-senders, remained unworried. "As long as you are not sending fraud messages or selling illegal weapons and pornography, you will be fine."
Nobody complained
Monitoring and screening services are available for spam messages, but spammers can get around them easily by changing phone cards, according to Su Xin, deputy director of Wireless Communication Technology R&D Center with Tsinghua University. That makes investigating and punishing illegal activity difficult, Su said.
Authorities in South China's Guangdong province blocked text messaging services on 900,000 mobile phone numbers in 2009 because users had sent large amounts of illegal, junk messages. Were there real customers behind those numbers?
"No subscribers applied to restore the text messaging service for their phone numbers during a 90-day complaint period," said Yang Yuncai, director of the Network and Information Security Department under the Guangdong Provincial Communications Administration.
A new national law requires buyers to present identification to purchase phone cards, but it is not implemented strictly, Su said.
Zhang Yan, the judge in the case of the four spammers, told China Daily that businesses have the responsibility to check the license of message operators but most do not.
In her court case, businesses that bought the advertisements ranged from property development to educational services. Zhang stressed that the jailed spam senders did not send messages involving fraud or illegal products, such as fake tax invoices.
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