At last, a mobile spam crackdown

Chinese police have finally cracked down on mobile base station spoofing, the source of an epidemic in mobile spam, reportedly arresting 1,530 people in a nationwide sweep over the past month.

According to the official Xinhua news service, a joint effort by nine government agencies has destroyed 24 “production dens”, seized 2,600 unlicensed base stations and uncovered 3,540 cases of fraud.

As this blog reported in December, one survey estimated that 200 billion mobile spam messages were sent in the first half of last year – roughly one a day for every single user in the country.

But it’s hard to overlook that this assault on spam began only after a prominent newspaper revealed the extent of the problem:

The Beijing News recently related the tale of a professional spammer who roams the Chinese capital with a small cell transceiver in his van, charging 1,000 yuan ($164) to reach thousands of users within several hundred metres.

The spammer, Guo Peng, said he had five GSM small cells, each costing around 50,000 yuan ($8,220), with which he earns up to 5,000 yuan a day. He can send out 6,000 messages in half an hour via the China Mobile or China Unicom networks. Guo said he knew at least 20 others in the business in Beijing, each with multiple base stations.

It’s difficult also not to contrast the belated interest in spam with the meticulous shutdown of unappetising political content on first Sina Weibo and now WeChat. One survey estimates that Weibo posts may have fallen by as much 70% after a series of campaigns last year.

Bear in mind, too, that mobile spamming is not victimless – it works by shielding an operator’s signal, causing calls to drop, not to mention the fraud and other criminal activities that spam enables. Plus of course the sheer annoyance to users. But these aren’t priorities.