A decline in email spam? [LWN.net]

A decline in email spam?

Posted Jul 9, 2011 19:56 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: A decline in email spam? by geuder
Parent article: A decline in email spam?

So has Google been hacked or did they sell my number?

Do mobile phone providers charge you for non-deliverable SMS? The spammer could just send SMS to all the telephone numbers in a particular range, starting at, say, 0000000 and finishing at 9999999, and see which ones get through. This is being done for e-mail addresses, so why not for SMS?

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A decline in email spam?

Posted Jul 9, 2011 20:26 UTC (Sat) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]

Yes, SMS is store and forward. Charging happens immediately when the message is sent. They don't care what happens after that. (This has been discussed especially for premium SMS services. If the user mispells the search, order or what ever service she was trying to use, she well end up paying for service that was never fulfilled.)

We have 5 mobile subscriptions in the family. Only one "won in the lottery" Of course I cannot be 100% sure that the number came from my Google account creation, but it was definitely the closest use of this phone in relation to spam. As I wrote the subscription is very much unused. Not saying that Google themselves do it, but certainly they are interesting for spammers.