Consumer 11.0: Paying for cell phone spam

The messages read like the thousands of spam e-mails many of us have gotten for years on our computers - or would get if we didn't have elaborate spam filters standing in their way.

"Get $1500 in Extra Cash Sent Immediately!" said one, directing recipients to a website to follow through on the fabulous offer.

"Confirmation," began the other, with that classic spam ruse that suggests you're hearing from a company you've already contacted. "Please Call 877-803-XXXX" - I'm hiding the last four digits to protect the guilty - "For your Walmart and Visa Gift Cards."

Len Weinstein didn't bite, of course. Rather, he felt bitten. These weren't the usual spams to his e-mail address. They were texts on his mobile phone, and as such they were costing him cash.

What happened next made matters worse. Hoping to stem the texts at their source, lest the 20-cent fees start multiplying, he tried reaching the senders - and got billed $4 or $5 each for international calls. Although they had ordinary-looking numbers, both were based in Canada.

Nor was AT&T Mobility much help - at least till he complained to the Federal Communications Commission and got his concerns bumped up to the executive level.

The first Customer Care reps all outlined three lousy choices. The common thread: All dumped cost or hassle back on him.

Weinstein could change his number, an inconvenience that would work only till the spammers found him again. He could block all texts, and lose a useful tool for in-a-pinch communications with his wife and daughters. Or he could buy a monthly texting plan.

I didn't do much better when I first got hold of AT&T. The only other option that spokeswoman Brandy Bell mentioned was signing up for "Smart Limits for Wireless," a program that allows subscribers to block texts from particular numbers. The cost: $4.99 a month - the same as 200 texts.

To Weinstein, the issue was about principle, not money. Why should he pay anything for unwanted telemarketing - and more if the floodgates ever open?

"It's not a function of the dollar amount. That's not a big deal," he says. "The big deal is that somebody has sold this phone number, and it's just going to spread."

Cell phone spam may fly largely under the radar, but it's long been seen as a problem - like e-mail spam, but with a price tag for consumers who pay by the text.

In a 2003 order, the FCC said unsolicited commercial texts were barred by the same law, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, that prohibits voice telemarketing to cell phones.

The only exceptions, the FCC says, are texts sent for emergency purposes, or if the receiving party "has given prior express consent to the caller." There's not even an exception for texters who can claim an "established business relationship," one of the larger loopholes under the rules limiting marketing calls to land lines listed on the federal Do Not Call list.

As with many spam and telemarketing issues, a key problem is what consumers can do about it. And that's where consumers such as Weinstein are stymied.

AT&T and its competitors seem to downplay the problem.

"We do see customers' complaints about spam periodically," Verizon Wireless' Sheldon Jones said via e-mail. But he said such complaints were "a small percentage of the total customer service 'hot buttons' we deal with."

AT&T's Bell was more emphatic.

"This is a rare situation, but we do understand his frustration," Bell told me. "It's not something we're hearing about on a regular basis as a customer complaint."

Nor is there evidence that federal regulators have done much about it - including the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, which has filed more than 60 cases against large-scale violators of the do-not-call rules but which hasn't decided whether being on the do-not-call list should protect you from unwelcome marketing texts.

But that could - and should - change.

Unwanted texts are probably a low-level annoyance to most of us, much like spam e-mail and illegal telemarketing - something to grouse about but ignore unless it reaches unbearable levels.

If your e-mail filters miss the occasional "herbal Viagra" ad, or you get an illegal marketing robocall, chances are that you grin and bear it. But if you paid by the pitch, you'd probably take notice, as Weinstein did. The question is, what could you do?

Right now, the FCC's answer is to file a complaint, which you can do online at www.fcc.gov or by calling 1-888-225-5322 - a number whose voice tree mentions "unwanted faxes and unwanted telephone calls" but doesn't say a word about unwanted texts.

But there's another approach, like the one the FTC took a dozen years ago when it asked e-mail users to start forwarding spam to it. You can still do that: About 44 million e-mails were forwarded last year to "spam@uce.gov," an FTC spokeswoman says.

Can you forward illegal text messages to the FCC or FTC? Not now, both agencies say - unless you can manage to cut and paste them into a complaint, an unwieldy process.

Ironically, AT&T Mobility does allow its customers to forward unwanted commercial texts to a short-code address: SPAM, or 7726. Weinstein talked to three AT&T service reps before someone finally brought it up. And Bell, albeit a new employee, didn't mention it either until I asked.

It's a dirty job to set up a repository to track unwanted, illegal texts. But somebody has to do it.