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Invasion of privacy is the result of SMS spam. Despite regulatory efforts, enterprises, mobile operators are thriving on and utilizing the potential profit of messages, while the mobile users have become frequent victims of SMS spams.

Well, SMS in global market is now an essential tool. Over the time, it has become the most economical and faster means of communication. It continues to be the star of the data services show with traffic volumes and revenues that continue to confound predictions.

However, when SMSs are experiencing such a phenomenal success as the cheapest, quickest, and easiest form of peer-to-peer mobile communication, unsolicited messaging has irritated subscribers like never before. People have been disturbed amidst meetings, annoyed in-between dinners, vexed during holidays, and yet there seems to be no end to this menace.

Spamming is an industry now! More than 2.3-5 bn spam messages are sent daily. Spam messages, largely consisting of real estate offers, advertisements for English lessons, fake tax receipts, hair oils, beauty spas, gym offers, loan opportunities, insurance, courier, hotels and resorts and even get rich schemes have grown quickly. The point that one keeps on getting spam SMSs without one's interface with the senders exposes the subscribers more to these unasked services.

Spam is superset of what we normally call as unsolicited commercial communication (UCC). In order to curb the UCC, Trai had notified the Telecom Unsolicited Commercial Communications Regulations, 2007 (4 of 2007) dated 5th June 2007. In these regulations, Trai defined unsolicited commercial communications.

The fact that mobile as a medium gives the advertiser the advantage of 'reach', keeps the spams going. It reaches 350 mn individuals in India, and helps reach the right target audience at the right place and at the right time. Filters like geographic targeting, demographic targeting, gender targeting, etc, helps reach such audience and increase the attention of the consumers. Another opinion that has added to the promotional messaging is that people can tend to ignore a TV or radio ad, however the probability of reaching a consumer is more on a mobile platform.

“We work on the principle of permission based marketing and strict anti-spam policies” Satya Kalyan Yerramsetti, CEO, SMSCountry	“We are strongly against sending or enabling spam messages” Beerud Sheth, founder & CEO, SMS Gup Shup	“You have to target the clients or customers who are directly associated with business” Mukesh Sareen, chief manager, IT, NACIL

Losing Ground
“Spam is annoying and intrusive for the recipient and ineffective for the advertiser. We are strongly against sending or enabling spam messages,” says Beerud Sheth, founder and CEO, SMS Gup Shup. But given the fact that corporates and clubs, schools and colleges, banks and TV channels – and all kind of set ups have a need to engage their members, employees, customers, prospects, partners, vendors, students, subscribers, etc, companies are allowing businesses to flourish in the name of bulk messages.

The reasons for the bombardment of SMSes are not tough to search. The SMS market despite declining prices continues to be fuelled by new subscribers. In the last quarter in India itself more than 1 mn new subscribers have been added to various mobile operator lists.

It is very cheap to advertise especially when one is able to send the messages to millions of people at a time. Operator SMS margin estimates vary, but typically maximum of up to 80-90% of SMS messaging revenues (being profit) are often quoted.

It has been forecast that the world SMS traffic will double between 2009 and 2011, driven by strong growth especially in developing markets like India and China.

“We have put spam filters in our entire messaging platform, which keeps checking each and every message which crosses through our platform” Rajdeep Gupta, Route SMS Solutions	“It is with proper regulatory mechanisms that spams can be checked” VV Raju, CEO, Way2SMS	“We offer comprehensive protection technologies that cover a wide range such as AV, firewall, anti spam, personal data protection, anti phishing, etc” Ratnamala Dam Manna, director, security technology & response, Symantec

Threats
Massive attacks have been recorded worldwide. For instance, in March 2008, a spam attack hit nearly 200 mn Chinese mobile phone users-approximately half of China's total mobile population received unwanted text messages from seven online advertising firms. China's telecom firm then unanimously took the decision to limit the number of messages to stop the rampant SMS spam.

Another set of problems that mars the subscribers is that spammers argue that if subscribers do not like or want the offer, one can easily get away by exercising the delete option. The problem is that it is very time-consuming to wade through an unfiltered mailbox. Moreover, spammers do everything in their power to ensure that you don't delete the message until you've read it, using misleading subject lines and fake sender names to try to trick into opening it. In India 40% of the messages sent to the subscribers constitute spams.

In the current scenario, mobile messages have come even on the agenda of the political parties. This year saw SMS as an effective campaigning tool for the elections. Pradeep Vohra, national convenor, IT cell (BJP) says, “The reason that we use bulk messaging is so that we can target 300 constituencies in a single go. This time we generated three to four national messages and those were circulated across the country to update the voters about our aims and ambitions.”

'A large number of telemarketers, who have not registered themselves with the DoT, are still continuing to make the commercial calls' RN Prabhakar, member, Trai What according to you, can be the reason behind the regulatory mechanisms like DNCR and NDNC not working? Consequent upon the regulations, the NDNC had been established which is primarily a national database containing lists of telephone numbers of all such subscribers who do not want to receive the UCC. The telemarketing industry comprises of a few large players and a number of small telemarketers who may be doing this either as a side business or on need basis. As these small telemarketers are not organized and in absence of any well laid out code of conduct, a number of these people have not registered themselves with the DoT. While reviewing the working and effectiveness of NDNC, Trai has noted that though a vast number of telemarketing calls have stopped coming on telephone numbers which are registered in the NDNC, a large number of telemarketers, who have not registered themselves with the DoT, are still continuing to make the commercial calls without scrubbing their list. How are you planning to thwart spammers? As mentioned earlier, spam is very broad term. Trai has addressed the commercial nature of such unsolicited calls and SMSs. There are constant efforts to punish the people abusing the code of conduct in regard to the UCC. Following are the actions that Trai intends to take against the telemarketers (registered and unregistered), service providers: Action against registered telemarketers: The originating service provider, to whom the complaint has been forwarded shall investigate the nature of call so received and if after such investigation, the originating access provider finds that such call is an unsolicited commercial communication, he shall charge Rs 500 to the telemarketer for every first UCC and Rs1,000 is charged for subsequent UCC. The originating access provider shall disconnect the telephone number/telecom resource of the telemarketer if the UCC is sent even after levying of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000, tariff. Action against unregistered telemarketers: If the telemarketer is found to be unregistered, then the service provider shall disconnect his telephone number/telecom resources after giving a notice of not less than seven days. Action against service providers: If the service provider does not take any action on the complaints against telemarketers, the service provider is liable to pay an amount by way of financial disincentive, not exceeding Rs 5,000 for first non-compliance of the regulation and in case of second or subsequent such non-compliance, an amount not exceeding Rs 20,000 for each such non-compliance. Your comments on the existing problem of SMS spamming? All SMS spams are not covered under UCC. Trai has addressed the unsolicited commercial communications including the ones that comes through SMSs. In the implementation of regulations certain difficulties were raised by service providers that whenever a subscriber makes a complaint of unsolicited commercial communication by SMS with the sender identification other than the normal ten digit mobile or fixed number-some alpha-numeric names like SBI Life or HSBC, etc, some numeric codes like 58888 or 56262 etc-it is difficult and time consuming for the service providers to identify the service provider from whose network such unsolicited commercial communication originated. In this regard, Trai directed service providers that the alpha-numeric identifier of all commercial SMSs which are sent with only sender identification and without the normal ten digit mobile number shall be prefixed by the code of the service provider and the code of the service area as specified by the authority. For example, in form of XY-HSBC, where X stands for the code allotted to the service provider and Y stands for the service area. This was implemented from February 1, 2009.

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