A Battle Against SMS Spam

Apparently a spammer somewhere has decided to put the return email address of a great many SMS (phone text message) spam messages as accounts from this domain. None of the accounts exist, none of the people exist, and the messages did not come from this domain.

The problem ulitimately I believe is that Sprint allows on their free web based SMS text sending web site ( http://messaging.sprintpcs.com/textmessaging/compose) the ability for anyone to send an SMS text message to a number of sprint phones and put anything they darn well please as the return address. That's a big security problem. A spammer can write a program that will use that webpage automatically 100s of times a day to send SMS spam out to any random phone numbers they want.

I've modified this web site to be the story of how I've tried to put a stop to it.

History of what I've done about it

Frankly, I was hoping it was a one time thing or an experiment by some script kiddie, and that it would just stop. This has not occured.

Calling sprint (888-211-4727) about the spam with return URL of newfind.net:

• 1st call - I was hung up on immediately
• 2nd call - She insisted that I had to deal with my service provider - even when I explained that the spam never goes through my service provider. The problem is from spammer to Sprint customer. She said she would put me through to tech support and hung up on me instead.
• 3rd call - Choose tech support at the automated answering system. Explained the problem. He told me first that I had to call the local authorities. I'll do that, but I pressed on anyway and was ultimately connected with Justin in the SMS department. He actually understood the problem and seemed empithetic. He spoke with his supervisor. But ultimately said he could only take my name and phone number and try to contact the 3rd party organization responsible for the sprint web site.

Next I'll call the authorities, and see if I can't figure out who I can contact about responsibility for the sprint web site.

You can email me at Shaun at this domain