Text Spam

I'm kind in love with my phone. For years, I've been a cell phone junkie, always drooling over the latest and greatest technology. Last year, I bought the first Motorola Droid and fell passionately in love. In fact, for the first time in my cell phone using life, I have no urge to upgrade. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember a time without cell phones.) But this really isn't about how much I love my little bundle of Android joy, this post is about something much more devious. Pure evil. SPAM.

Now, at this point, everyone knows about email spam. But did you know about text messaging spam? To be honest, I really didn't until today. I'd occasionally gotten unsolicited text messages, but they were so few and far between that I just blew them off. Today I heard the repeated chimes of my personalized text tone going off over and over. (You too can make personalized text alerts out of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" for free using a little app called Ringdroid but we'll talk about that in another post. Turn around, bright eyes, and keep reading about spam.) You can imagine my discontent, when instead of it being my BFF frantically trying to let me know that John Fluevog was having a 90% off sale, it was some dick telling me I could borrow money from money600.com. Then cash39.com. And so on...

I'm going to assume that since you're reading a tech blog that you have the common sense to not try and visit the sites I've listed above. While it may boost my readership since you'll need this article and most likely a priest to fix your computer, it would show embarrassingly bad judgement on your part and all your friends will laugh at you. So let it be known that I claim no responsibility for repairs to your computer or your ego should you chose to brain fart your way over to visit said sites.

In total I got 9 text messages trying to lure me to their shady cash advance sites. Now, I've never applied for a cash advance, and I'm kind of a control freak about giving out my cell number so if this can happen to me it can happen to anybody. It made me feel a special kind of rage when I realized, that if I didn't have an unlimited texting plan, I'd be paying for each one of these low life messages. So I set out to figure out how to block these little weasels and found out it's pretty simple. Most of these messages don't actually come from real cell phones. They come from the Internet, sent in mass, in a whack-a-mole attempt to get through to anything that might be a cell phone. I found this article from the New York Times called "How to Block Cellphone Spam" explaining how to block text messages that originate from the Internet. They go into step by step detail for several carriers. For example:

"Verizon Wireless: Log in at vtext.com. Under Text Messaging, click Preferences. Click Text Blocking. You’re offered choices to block text messages from e-mail or from the Web. Here again, you can block specific addresses or Web sites."

The article says this service is not available on some carriers yet, but it was written several years ago and at this point I'm sure everyone has caught up. I actually am a Verizon user, and I  just logged into My Verizon and clicked the block Internet spam button under the plan heading. I'm sure their method works too, but I was most thankful for the information that the service was available. I thought I may be stuck getting multiple spam texts a day for the rest of my life. Oh the drama of it all!