Mobile Spam
June 9, 2008 on 2:56 pm | In Funnyish, Musings, Rants by Josh Jones | 20 Comments
The other day I bought one of those new banana creme-filled Twinkies!
It seemed delicious enough, and it was!
After eating it in six seconds, I noticed on the wrapper they had some kind of cool contest going on!
It said I could enter by visiting their website or by sending a text message to them.. how modern of Hostess!
Since I couldn’t find anything about the contest at hostesscakes.com, I decided, what the hey… I’ll text em to win!
I’d never done any of those “text blah to 1234 to win” things before, so I was mostly curious to see if I’d start to get mobile spam…
Well, I texted. And, I got:
Sorry, UR not a winner. Play again tomorrow! Thx from Hostess. See rules at www.hostesscakes.com. Std/other txt msg rates apply. Help? Txt HELP.
So I decided to send them “HELP”. I got back:
4 help w/the sweepstakes, pls email us incl cell number hostess@promosvcs.com or call 8663510327 2 stop, txt STOP. Other charges may apply
Hmm, okay, I figured I’d better send them “STOP” now. So I did, and received…
This message confirms that u have unsubscribed and will no longer receive messages from Hostess sweepstakes. Questions email hostess@promosvcs.com
Alright, fair enough… I figured after that perhaps they were nice and legit and weren’t going to keep sending me messages or sell me out to 3rd party lists.
Two Days Later
I got a text message.
It was from “757-14″, and it said:
RingAZA! Enter UR PIN online to get UR BONUS TONES & Credits! 9.99/mo UR PIN = 2679. Info=HELP or 1-866-616-6067 Quit=STOP. othr chrgs may apply
Twinkie the Kid had sold me out!
I couldn’t believe it. Well, I sort of could. I guess I asked for it. Nevertheless, I texted back, “STOP” though I did it with the same feeling one gets when trying to stop a tsunami with a paper napkin.
RingAZA! U have been unsubscribed from Text Alerts. You will not receive any additional messages going forward. More info 866-616-6067
Hmm, well, maybe I was in the clear after all…
The Next Day
RingAZA! Great Job, Ur Ringtones R Ready! Reply YES now & Pick all Ur Bonus Content! UR not being billed 4 this msg. 4 info: http://75714.net. Sub = 9.99/mo
There’s just something so creepy about TXT-speak in corporate messages (and spam).
Just for the hey of it again, I once more sent back “STOP”… and again got exactly the same unsubscribe message.
RingAZA! U have been unsubscribed from Text Alerts. You will not receive any additional messages going forward. More info 866-616-6067
The Next Day
To my absolute surprise, nothing!
And actually, I haven’t gotten a single sms spam since then. Maybe there IS some sort of higher level of accountability to txt spamming, since for your “short code” (e.g. 75714) to work you have to actually make a deal with all the major cell carriers?
I dunno why, but this incident got me thinking a little bit about what the “state of the spamming world” must be like these days.
It’s got to be getting at least a little harder to get people’s email addresses as a spammer, right? It used to be everybody had their email address on their web site, or in their WHOIS info, or publicly posted to a newsgroup or a mailing list, or used it when registering for anything online.
Nowadays, it seems like everybody’s just got a contact form, uses Domain Privacy, just posts in online forums (where their email is hidden), and uses throw-away hotmail/yahoo/spam.la addresses when creating online accounts.
And on top of it all, spam filtering is finally getting a bit better. I bet them’s some lean times right now in the email spam business.
One More Anecdote
In fact, I have another little story about how desperate times seem to be for spammers!
My wife recently started a floral design business, and so she got a couple of those door magnets for our car advertising her business URL, phone number, and email address.
Well, one time we got back to the car and noticed one of the two magnets was gone! How strange we thought.. had it fallen off? Had somebody taken it? If so, why? As a prank? Was it a competitor? Maybe a potential customer who didn’t have a pen handy?
That was sort of annoying, but not a huge deal; it was only $17.
But then a funny thing happened.
About a week later, my wife got her first spam ever to her newly-created business email address.. the one that’d been on the magnetic car door sign!
Man, those spammers must really be desparate to stoop to such labor-intensive, low-brow email address-harvesting techniques!
And what was that spam for?
Magnetic car door signs!
Ha, I couldn’t believe it! And ever since then, she gets about three spams a week to that address.. all for magnetic car door signs!
It’s not spam, it’s blackmail!
20 Responses to “Mobile Spam”
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June 9th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Sooooooooo, the point being that Gmail has an awesome spam filtering service so we should move our mail off Dreamhost over to Google?
Just trying to figure out the meaning of the post guys.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:08 pm
I bet they’ll just mail you back your stolen magnet
June 9th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
that poor Saab….
June 9th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Funny thing about the Twinkies: decades ago they had banana as one of the creme ingredients. Then during the war they got too expensive, so they dropped the banana, so to speak. How disturbing that now they’ve brought back the banana flavor, but not the ingredient. Twinkies are even more phony as a food source than the can of Spam….
June 9th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
One thing I recommend is reCAPTCHA [ http://recaptcha.net ] and its MailHide service [ http://mailhide.recaptcha.net ]. MailHide hides email addresses in a creative way. It breaks up your email so that if it’s say hahawhatajoke@lol.com it becomes something like haha…@lol.com. The three dots (elipsis) are a link which one clicks on, solves a quick CAPTCHA (If you know what reCAPTCHA is all about, you won’t complain) and gives you the email address. It’s similar to what Google is using in their google groups site.
If you use WordPress, I am the developer for the official recaptcha plugin [ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-recaptcha/ ]. You can install that and it will automatically hide emails, you can just type them in as plain text [ haha@lol.com ] or hyperlinks and it will hide them. IT also has features of putting reCAPTCHA forms on the comments pages as well as on the registration page, all of this is configurable.
I know it’s a plug but I figured it might help anyone who’s in need of some good, fool proof anti-spam solution.
June 9th, 2008 at 9:36 pm
Greg, you’ll figure out soon enough that half the posts here don’t have points. Learn to love them anyway.
June 10th, 2008 at 12:46 am
Yes, the man searching for meaning in blog posts has a long life ahead. I suppose he is at least not searching for meaning in the comments! (stop reading now while you can)
June 10th, 2008 at 6:36 am
and I quote…
On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, you wrote:
> I have domains set up for my kids [...]
> Emails at those domains are not used for ANYTHING or published anywhere. All
> I have on those domains is a standard Wordpress installation (up to date)
>
> Why am I receiving porn spam at these addresses? The only place they exist
> on the net is in the Wordpress package and in the Dreamhost server.
>
> Is there a security hole in Wordpress I missed?
> After your reply, I’ll disable those addresses. No on uses them anyway.
I apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused you. It’s very
possible that these domain names themselves were ‘harvested’ from WHOIS
records and spammers are just sending email to every address they can
think of at that domain and then wind up getting some through to your
valid addresses. A security hole in WordPress shouldn’t cause anything
like this and as long as you’re running the most up-to-date version you
should be fine.
Spam is something that generally winds up affecting everyone, whether or
not an email address was ‘published’ online anywhere. Using the method
above, they can target new domains or email addresses just hours after
them being set up.
Please don’t hesitate to write back if you need help with anything else.
Thanks!
Mike S
June 10th, 2008 at 8:35 am
They probably took a few days to remove you from their list due to volume. You know like the magazines that they say you MIGHT still get the next issue because they have so many to send out they queue it up way in advance. Well, that might be their excuse anyways..
June 11th, 2008 at 7:52 am
I hate getting spam text. They drive me crazy, if you call your cell phone company they can sometimes block short codes from texting you… I don’t know if that is something that you would want to do, but I know that Sprint and T-mobile can do it….
June 11th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Don’t spammers, per the CanSPAM act have up to 10 business days to remove you? It’s annoying but still legal.
June 11th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Your suggestions system is broken, so I’ll just go ahead and post here, you really should allow vpsadjust or provide the functionality as a built in feature with VPS. I’ve had mine for a month now and I’m not happy with having to manually adjust and eyeball my server’s needs. There are spikes of use during which I must be serving error 500s but I’ll be damned if I’m going to stick my server up to 600 permanently when it chugs along happily at less than 200 most of the time.
Automatic adjustment is simply efficient.
June 12th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Is it possible that the stealing was unrelated, and the email address was stolen by the company that made the magnetic door magnets when she gave it to them to have printed?
June 12th, 2008 at 9:31 pm
Josh was lucky he got an opt-out option…
July 4th, 2008 at 10:50 am
hi,i want to confirm that i got a message on my pnone.the message says that ringAZA!great job, ur ringtones r ready! reply yes now and pick pick all our bonus content! ur r not being billed 4 this message.4 info:http://75714.net.sub=9.99/mo.the service money that u r adding on my phone bill is not what i wanted.i never subscribed for anything and u r adding money and sending messages on my phone.i don’t want ur service.i don’t want to add or get any ringtone or bonus.
July 4th, 2008 at 10:51 am
plz don’t add any money.i will be thankful to u.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
@Tim: I know what you mean. I used to get alot of free magazines that way. I used to send in the card (free issue — no obligation – cancel without payment and keep issue type deal) and after getting the issue send the bill back marked CANCEL and no payment. I’d usually get 1 or 2 more issues afterwards and no word from any payment collections agencies.
August 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am
it looks like a nice site, thanks..
September 30th, 2008 at 1:16 am
LOL
that doesn’t even make any sense!
October 31st, 2008 at 7:50 am
Graet post mate. Keep them coming….