Good
Throw the book at them....hanging's too good for them...etc....
Sick of these txts, especially the ones that wake me up in the small hours of the morning.
Bah....etc....
A clampdown on text spam has led to a police raid on offices in Urmston, Manchester, and the seizure of equipment by the Information Commissioner's Office. The UK data privacy watchdog was given enhanced powers last year to tackle the growing problem of junk SMS messages, including the authority to ask mobile operators for …
"We will take action where....companies are profiteering from unlawful activity"
Why not just take action where companies are undertaking unlawful activity? Why does there have to be profit involved? Am I any less of a victim if the company selling my details on illegally isn't competent enough to make a profit?
So why is the ICO totally incapable of taking any action against phone spammers?
If you're registered with TPS and get phone spam ICO website just says 'report it to TPS' who say 'We can't do anything, but we'll tell the ICO about it in our annual report'.
Why can't the ICO just pull the plug on the phone offenders? Three complaints and the phone line is suspended for 7 days, 3 more complaints and it's 28 days etc.
ICO: almost as big a waste of oxygen as the ASA
While they're at it, someone should pass some legislation compelling telco operators to provide, for free, the option to block calls coming from certain countries. I'm thinking specifically of the 20 or so calls I get every week to my landline from scammers in India.
I got several last year, on the lines of "Our records indicate that you may be entitled to compensation of £3750 for the accident you had". An accident that caused amnesia apparently.
So I bulk emailed a few hundred 419 scammers with the message "I'm interested. Please phone me on (the number the text spam came from)".
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Have you ever *tried* reporting this crap out to the ICO, to say they are uninterested is a massive understatement. If you still have the will to live after trying to report this stuff over the phone to actually put in a report you will find that the form to make the submission on is in MS Word format only ( not an open format ) and suffice to say "requires" reams of personal information that frankly I don't trust those bastards with.
All it requires is a quick web form asking for the source number and the message sent - simples non?
I can see how spim works here in the US - find a free web-to-SMS gateway, rape it to send a bazillion spims, find three suckers, profit, lather rinse repeat. Since the cost is borne by the recipients of the spim, ANY suckers are pure profit.
But I thought over there that the rule was "sender pays" - so how are they sending these spim cheaply enough to make money?
"But I thought over there that the rule was "sender pays" - so how are they sending these spim cheaply enough to make money?"
Most phone contracts, including PAYG have a certain number of free SMS per day/week/whatever. That's probably why in the story referenced in the article as happing "last year" involved blocking 20,000 SIMs. Unregistered PAYG SIMs are given away like there's no tomorrow.