Verizon Wireless Says Filters Cut Wireless Spam’s Impact
Better filters are helping to keep wireless spam from reaching Verizon Wireless subscribers, the company said Fri. The carrier last week filed suit in federal court in N.J., complaining that Nev.-based I-VEST Global and “John Does” sent wireless spam to Verizon customers. Thanks to spam filters and network monitoring, fewer than 5,000 of the 12 million pieces of spam sent were delivered, a company release said. “In some of the previous cases there were millions of messages getting through to handsets,” a Verizon Wireless spokesperson said: “In this case, we were able to prevent millions of messages from getting through.”
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“It still takes a lot of resources to do all that blocking -- there’s a lot of time and money that goes into blocking all of that,” Leigh Schachter, a Verizon lawyer working on the anti-spam cases, told us. Schachter said Verizon and other carriers saw spam spike last year, though the stream has eased this year.
Spammers have many ways to hide a message’s sender, said Schachter: “These people are pretty ingenious and we are on the effort to try to stop them and take some of the profit out if it and chase them out of the business,” he said: “We'll block their IP addresses and they'll come around and try to send it some other way. It’s a continuing cat and mouse game.”
The suit was the 7th the company has filed since 2004 seeking injunctions against wireless spammers. Verizon said in a statement that as, of April 2007, I-VEST attempted to send text messages to its subscribers, offering information about stocks or real estate. The suit alleges that I-VEST violated the Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act as well as state fraud and privacy laws. “On this case, we were able to block most of the messages from reaching our customers’ handsets, [but] even one unwanted text message is one too many,” said Steven Zipperstein, Verizon Wireless gen. counsel.
Subscribers exchanged 22.3 billion text messages in Q1 2007 -- up 4.6 billion from the previous quarter, the carrier said. “Wireless spam impairs the delivery of legitimate messages, and because spam is often sent in high volume over short periods of time, it can place a strain on the overall performance of the wireless network,” Verizon Wireless said.