"Missed Call" SPAM Under ACMA Investigation

Written by Adam Gosling

Friday, 15 September 2006

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has warned two companies that their "missed call" marketing activities are "likely to constitute serious and extensive contraventions of the Spam Act 2003". It has not moved to prosecute them, but says its investigations are ongoing. No doubt the scammers have made enough money from leaving missed call messages on people's mobile phones that they have happily stopped rather than incur potential legal action as they have "stopped making these calls while ACMA's investigations are undertaken". The scam involves calling a target's mobile phone long enough to register a missed call, but not long enough for the user to answer the call. Most trusting and unsuspecting mobile phone owners will return the call using the Caller ID function on their phone. But rather than returning a legitimate call they are funding the SPAM activities as all they get is a promotional message on an answering machine. In one case the dupes were told they had one a free ringtone or something and all they had to do was call a 1900 number to retrieve it. Of course the premium services number charged them for the collection of their free content prize. ‘This is similar to receiving email spam which includes nothing except a link to a website,' said Nerida O'Loughlin, General Manager of ACMA's Industry Outputs Division. ‘In many ways, it is worse, as the cost of marketing is shifted almost entirely to the target, and the method of communication is more intrusive. ‘ACMA has closely scrutinised the missed call marketing practice to determine whether it is in breach of the anti-spam legislation. We believe that it is, and would like to send a clear message to the public and the industry about the legality of this practice,' she said. The practice caused something of an outrage (ass ou would expect) when a website listing the numbers used by these scammers caused friction between the site's owners and the marketing company behind the SPAM. mobilised can't recall the site, or the company, but we do recall that a death threat was alleged. There must have been a significant amount of money involved. The ACMA recommends that members of the public should be wary of calling back ‘missed calls' from numbers they do not recognise. Members of the public who have experienced ‘missed call' marketing can lodge complaints on the ACMA website. Complainants are asked to include as much detail as possible, including the calling number, date and time of the missed call, and, if the complainant has rung the number, the content of the recorded message. Related news items ACMA Launches SPAM Toolbar -29/05/2006 Newer news items LAX Firecracker Had A Sony Battery -21/09/2006 Vendors Contemplate Formal Standards For Lithium Ion -21/09/2006 Toshiba Joins Dell, Apple In Sony Recall -19/09/2006 IBM Laptop Explodes At LAX -17/09/2006 Dell, Apple Travel Restrictions Grow -15/09/2006 Older news items Only 6,000? Panasonic Must Have Recall Envy -06/09/2006 Unprotected Phones Abandoned At Airports -03/09/2006 Discarded Handhelds Reveal Secrets -30/08/2006 Apple Follows Dell To Replace Sony Batteries -24/08/2006 Naughty Dell Notebooks Powerless On Qantas -23/08/2006 Tag This Now: