Mobile phone spam is here to stay

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Fumi Ishii has changed her mobile phone e-mail address several times and once spent a month tracking down her tormentor, but the spam keeps coming.

"I found the sender's contact information after a lot of research, and I called them up and complained," said the 57-year old print firm owner. "They started up again, but this time I can't figure out where it's coming from."

Spam, or electronic junk mail, typically offering dating services, pornography and get-rich schemes, has moved beyond traditional e-mail and into text-messaging and mobile e-mail.

"(Mobile phones are) a device that's synonymous with the person as opposed to fixed-line phones," said Nick Ingelbrecht, an analyst for research firm Gartner. "It's inevitable that they're going to exploit that."

Governments have enacted laws to punish offenders, and operators are taking steps to protect customers, but the problem persists.

"It's something you have to live with because it's impossible to shut it down," said Rudy Chan, former chief executive of wireless services company China.com Inc at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Hong Kong.

Mobile spam can be more than just a nuisance.

In markets such as Japan, users end up being charged for unwanted e-mails. For operators, meanwhile, the headache goes beyond bad public relations.

"If operators have to deliver unnecessary messages, then they have to beef up their networks to support the excess traffic," said Hirohisa Furuichi, an official in Japan's communications ministry. "Large amounts of spam could also clog things up and cause the delay of legitimate e-mail."

EVOLVING THREAT

It is difficult to pinpoint the financial burden on operators of mobile spam, but leading Japanese provider NTT DoCoMo Inc. (9437.T) said it spent $250 million on antispam measures in 2001, when the problem came to a head in Japan.

"The most important thing is good customer experience," said Canning Fok, group managing director for Hutchison Whampoa Ltd. (0013.HK), although he said this was not a major problem for his company, which operates mobile services in Europe and Asia.

Travellers bombarded with "welcome to" messages as they cross borders might argue that the operators are part of the problem, and the short-text messaging (SMS) format is certainly to some extent under operators' control.

However, analysts say that as more phones connect to the Internet, the serious spammers will have a freer hand.

There are about two billion mobile phone users worldwide and SMS traffic is doubling or tripling in many regions.

Mobile phone operators have made a lot of headway in reducing spam by limiting the number of messages that a user can receive at once and in a single day, and by allowing users to reject messages from certain numbers or e-mail servers.

Some operators have also suspended or cut off spam offenders while others, in China, Taiwan, Japan and Malaysia, have tightened registration requirements on pre-paid phones, where anonymity made abuse easy.

But the fight continues.

"It's an ever evolving threat and carriers are constantly refortifying their firewalls making them bigger, better and stronger to combat the threat," said Joe Farren, a spokesman for CTIA, a U.S. wireless industry group.

(Additional reporting by George Chen in Hong Kong, Jennifer Tan in Singapore, Rhee So-eui in Seoul, Santosh Menon in London, Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington and Sinead Carew in New York)