Spam explosion, who gets the money?

According to statistics from Bkav Corporation's monitoring system, there are currently 13.9 million spam messages being sent every day. During the pre-Tet promotional season, the amount of "terrorist" spam messages sent every day continues to increase sharply.

Nearly 14 million spam messages are hitting mobile phone users every day. PHOTO: Nhu Y.

Prepaid subscribers float

An important reason for the current flood of spam messages is the lax management of prepaid subscribers by network operators. Mr. Nguyen Van Hung in Viet Tri city, Phu Tho - a person with many years of experience in SIM trading - said that SIM traders often import SIMs in batches directly from network operators or buy and sell from other SIM traders. Imported SIMs can be unactivated or pre-activated. Although the sale of pre-activated SIMs is prohibited, in reality a large number of activated SIMs are offered every day.

According to regulations, an ID card can only register 3 subscriber numbers, but if only 1 number in the ID card is different, 3 more subscribers can be registered. Those formal regulations have made registering a prepaid subscription extremely simple and uncontrollable. For spam messages advertising beautiful sim numbers, they are usually done randomly, the list for spam messages is purchased from the network operator's staff, so the more postpaid subscribers or beautiful phone numbers subscribers, the more likely they are to be spammed with spam messages.

In Hanoi, there are many places selling SIM cards. Cards of network operators are sold from tea shops, grocery stores, to agents. Promotional SIM cards are very cheap, only 30,000 VND - 40,000 VND, especially promotional SIM cards are almost all pre-activated.

An employee who sells SIM cards and collects fees for a network operator in Hanoi said that with current regulations, a person can use many mobile phone numbers. Although the regulation requires a photo ID when registering for a prepaid subscription, it is not easy to find out the name of the subscriber, because it is also related to the subscriber code. "If you want to use it most comfortably, just buy a junk SIM card on the street, it is cheap and no one cares who you are," said the female SIM card sales employee.

Buying and selling phone numbers is as easy as buying vegetables.

Contributing to the explosion of spam messages is the existence and development of the market for buying and selling personal information and customer phone numbers on many websites and social networks. At the address http://dskhachhang ... publicly selling customer lists including full data of a customer such as: full name, phone number, email, position, business line... arranged and divided by industry, income level.

The social networking site “Customer Data” sells customer lists for 100,000 VND - 300,000 VND/list, buying in bulk gets a discount. The list is also clearly classified: customers with income over 20 million/month; customers of businesses; list of Directors - Chairmen of the Board of Directors of large companies in Ho Chi Minh City,...

Speaking with Tien Phong reporter, a representative of the leader of a department of information and communications affirmed that with the current situation of spam messages, the first benefit is the network operators, then the businesses and individuals who use it to advertise their products and goods.

“Mobile text messages are a large part of the revenue of network operators. Some network operators also use text messages as a form of promotion, freeing domestic text messages, so the number of text messages has increased extremely sharply and this also makes control more difficult,” said a representative of a Department of Information and Communications.

According to Gia dinh.net