Mobile Marketing Forum, Barcelona: the shape of things to come?

Rating: the need to separate spam and real traffic

By Annie Turner

This is what the chat was about in the morning break: a developer in Italy had a bright idea and was beta testing a mobile app for software licence protection. They put it on the web for input from fellow developers. It worked by putting it onto mobile phones, so users could replicate the software and developers could charge for the new copies. Unfortunately it escaped into the wide world, without a preceding country code. So now the application sends SMS to a non-existent number, forever, and the handset keeps trying to resend the unsendable message as well.

This has reached epic proportions, although only 3,000 to 4,000 handsets per network are affected, they can each send 200 SMS a minute. This means operators can get such spikes of usage that they aren’t able to deliver the legitimate SMS traffic that makes them money – not to mention annoying their customers by poor service.

Take this one step further where hacking has moved from geeks showing off to each other to generating denials of service attacks and attempted frauds and viruses that replicate and send to everyone in a victim’s contacts. An SMS spammer could run up a terrific bill on someone’s phone without them even knowing what their device was up to. Why not blackmail Vodafone by threatening to take down its SMS infrastructure just before the voting starts for Come Dancing (smash UK TV show)?

And all this skulduggery is just coming to the boil as operators start to try to monetise advertising, marketing, content delivery – all of which demand a great deal of trust on the part of the consumer plus it can cost an operator EUR60 per customer service call. Ouch. Not so much other revenue streams opening up as new costs multiplying.

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