Mobile phone spam

As the popularity of mobile phones surged in the early 2000's, frequent users of text messaging began to see an increase in the number of unsolicited (and generally unwanted) commercial advertisements being sent to their telephones through text messaging. This can be particularly annoying for the recipient, because unlike with email, it is usually difficult or impossible to delete the message without reading it. In the future, some telcos believe that SMS spam is going to be the next big problem as the fast development of technology allows relatively cheap ways to send SMS spam using the internet.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spamming is economically viable because advertisers have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass mailings. Because the barrier to entry is so low, spammers are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited mail has become very high. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. Spamming is widely reviled, and has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.^{[citation needed]}

The people that create electronic spam are called spammers.

Short Message Service (SMS) is a communications protocol allowing the interchange of short text messages between mobile telephone devices. The SMS technology has facilitated the development and growth of text messaging. The connection between the phenomenon of text messaging and the underlying technology is so great that in parts of the world the term "SMS" is used colloquially as a synonym for a text message from another person or the act of sending a text message.

SMS as used on modern handsets was originally defined as part of the GSM series of standards in 1985^[1] as a means of sending messages of up to 160 characters, to and from GSM mobile handsets.^[2] Since then, support for the service has expanded to include alternative mobile standards such as ANSI CDMA networks and Digital AMPS, as well as satellite and landline networks.^[3] Most SMS messages are mobile-to-mobile text messages, though the standard supports other types of broadcast messaging as well.

[Reference: Wikipedia]