3GWeek - Asia’s Mobile News

Hey, bad news for Asian: There are eight text message spam for person per week.

Within hundred of millions mobile phone users (about 555 million), China undoubtfully is the perfect target for spam. Especially the text message spam. Tech Herald reports today via AP that the spam is containing commercial message which was sent to more than two-hundred millions mobile phones in China with the help of top two carriers; China Mobile and China Unicom. Most of that spam filled with ad about cars, property, and fake document.

For China Mobile, text message spam is absolutely a big problem for their economy since this medium is by far the biggest income for its revenue. Last year, there were 386.6 million subscribers sent 502.7 billion SMS’s in 2007, up 42.3% from 2006. Whoaaaa ….

Who’s responsible for this damage? Though not to be the single trouble maker in this case, famous company Focus Media (and six other online advertising firms) were said to have transmitted junk to those subscribers. As a consequence, China Mobile said that it was shutting down Focus Media’s message service port. This is an act of prevention to save their users from large amounts of (invaluable) short messages.

China’s government via Zhong Zhihong, an official at the Ministry of Information Industry in charge of information security, urged telecoms companies to do a better job of blocking spam, since that it was technically not difficult to do so. Is it?

Source: Tech Herald and Forbes and AP

Image courtesy of Focus Media and Mobile Mag