Cell phone owners paying for spam

With carriers like AT&T Wireless and Sprint charging nominal fees to both send and receive short messages, wireless spam, in the form of 160-character text messages, could eventually be responsible for a considerable portion of a cell-phone users bill.

Hoping to recoup much of the costs of building better, faster phone networks, many carriers are now fearing that wireless users will be put off permanently when they realise that they are footing the bill for spammers.

"It's absolutely unacceptable to be involved in advertising where you pass the cost onto the consumer," said Rodney Joffe, head of the anti-spam group Whitehat. "When it comes to cell phones, it costs them nothing to send it but costs anyone with a cell phone money. The recipient ends up paying."

Himself a victim of cell phone spam, Joffe has filed a lawsuit which he is now converting into a class-action suit because of the growing number of complaints.

These developments are occurring despite the fact that the Wireless Advertising Association, in the early days of short text messaging, drafted a set of rules for advertisements sent to cell phones, asking advertisers to first obtain permission from wireless users.

NEWS JUST IN: NTT DoCoMo, Japan's dominant cell phone operator, has committed to spending $8.22 million to build systems to block spam over its service. It said it receives about 950 million e-mails every day, of which about 800 million are returned to senders because of unknown addresses, putting a huge strain on its servers. Much of the spam is sent from Web-based services such as dating clubs. --Reuters