Spammers Keep Texting

As if remembering to register your phone number with the national do not call registry and filtering out hundreds of daily spam messages a day isn't pain enough,Nigerian refugees with an offer you can't refuse can now text you. According to an article in Business Week, 1.1 million spam messages, or SPIT (spam over Internet telephony) were sent in 2007, a 38 percent increase over 2006.

"Wireless phones are a brand-new attack target for the hackers," says Tom Bowers, senior security evangelist with Kaspersky Lab, a software vendor...

Spammers, using automated dialers, can shoot millions of texts to random cell-phone numbers. Phone companies intercept many of them; in May, Verizon
Wireless sued telemarketers that it said had "inundated" the company with more than 12 million unsolicited commercial text messages. Verizon said it blocked all but 4,618 from reaching customers, but the torrent still hit them with unwanted charges and clogged networks.

With more and more spammers headed towards SMS who knows how successful wireless carriers will be in filtering out these unwanted messages -- and expenses for their users. Will wireless providers have to change their fees in order to eliminate unwanted charges? I always thought it was silly the the person sending and the person receiving the text message had to pay. What a scam (and now with spam!)