Cell Phone Spam!

Cell phone customers from Seattle were victims of telephone spam. I would have never thought this is going to happen, since text messages are not free, but it has been known that hackers and scammers will stop at nothing when trying to take advantage of others. For example, hackers that have recently downed NameDrive are said to have spent a lot of dough, probably a 5 or 6 number figure.

As I've seen on Komotv this is part of a classic stock-based spam-scam campaign. Here's how it goes - The hacker sends a lot of messages to people to try and make them buy some stock from a company. He already has many shares there and when more people start buying shares, their price rises. The company usually isn't much of a high-profile corporation and when the scammers see that their shares have reached the highest price, they sell them and cash-in before they crash and burn. Of course, for this scheme to work properly, they need to persuade the people first.

What is really fishy is this - why would someone you don't know want to do you good and give you such a hint for free? Of course they have something to gain. And apparently the winnings from such a scam are so big that they are now doing this with cell-phones users. And boy, is that a large public! Let's be serious, almost everyone has a cell these days, more than those who have e-mails.

Another great thing about this scam is the fact that there is no such thing as spam-filtering for mobile phones. This way, they don't have to bother with who knows what fancy techniques to get their messages to the users. All they have to do is be convincing enough and hit a lot of targets. Whatever you do, do not trust such messages!