January 17, 2005
`Friendly' cellphone messages carry a hefty price
Japanese fans of SMS via cellphone-had should be prudent, warns Asahi. Fraudsters are tapping into the system to fool people into paying huge bills.
Users receive a message on their phone from a name they recognize, either that of a friend or their phone service provider. If they respond by clicking on an URL link in the message, they get whisked to a nasty site and whammed with a big service charge.
Bogus messages include sms by a friend claiming that he's in the hospital or notices from phone providers that seem legitimate.
A victim clicked on the address displayed and was transferred to a pornographic site. He later received an e-mail charging him "60,000 yen, payable within six days."
KDDI Corp. has received customer complaints, sometimes more than 10,000 a month, since spring 2003. The company set up a special section to handle the problem. It also stopped offering a bulk mailing service that allowed a user to send duplicate messages to multiple recipients.
Unfortunately, nothing is officially illegal about the practice. The law that regulates unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam, did not include a provision covering SMS. Now the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications is planning to add SMS to the spam control law.
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