Category: spammer list

Walmart Text Spam and How to fight it!

Paul

Interesting text messages!

I’ve had a long weekend doing some stuff and I happen to get two different text from two different numbers, with the same text.   Now you if you’ve been an avid reader of this blog, you know I REALLY HATE SPAM!  I even talked about blog referrer spam and how it just looks bad on companies.  

Text Numbers So far:

310-435-9136

214-600-2674

You have been selected for a $1,000 Walmart GiftCard, Enter code “FREE” at http://www.walmart.com.xxx.biz/wm/ to claim your prize: 161 left!

Why spammers are using text messages now?

Most of the time, the reason spammers are going to text spamming now is that it is far easier to spam you on your text message then to use email.   Hey let’s face it who is going to report the spam and who do you report it them too?  These are the reasons why spammers are going to go this route, it is much harder to block or report these spam messages and they know it.  So I figured if they are going to send messages my way, I’d send messages to the right provider and thus I went back to my old post about reporting text message spam.

I’m looking for Android Apps that do this!

I’ve been searching around for an app that does this, but most of them just block it and don’t really report it! I’d really want to make it hard for the spammers to want to send text messages.   Right now the cost of sending text spam is low but if it starts to make it less profitable they will go somewhere else to spam.

Some of the Apps that I will try are:

 

  • Handcent SMS — Handcent SMS is a powerful free sms/mms tools for your android phone.  The most popular messaging app on the Android Market, Handcent SMS is a powerful, customizable, and free SMS/MMS app that fully unleashes the messaging potential of Android devices.
  • Mr. Number Text, Call & Block — Text and call the people you love. Block everyone else.  Mr. Number is a messenger, dialer, and contact manager with built-in call and text blocking (free application) and automatic reverse lookup for numbers you don’t know (Caller ID).
  • Phone Spam Blocker —  NUMBERCOP blocks spam calls and text from 50.000 telemarketers & scam artists Getting SPAM CALLS or TEXT SMS SPAM ? NUMBERCOP is the easiest way to block them. NUMBERCOP knows 50.000 spamming phone numbers: Phone scams, phishing calls and annoying telemarketers.  NUMBERCOP blocks spam calls and text from 50.000 telemarketers & scam artistsGetting SPAM CALLS or TEXT SMS SPAM ? NUMBERCOP is the easiest way to block them. NUMBERCOP knows 50.000 spamming phone numbers: Phone scams, phishing calls and annoying telemarketers.

As you can tell some of these that I’ve found do check caller ID but I am hoping that it will be easier to find the carrier that is being used to spam but at least these do have some ways to block text spam SMS.   My only hope is that someone app developer will come up with a way to report text spam messages to the right company and thus making it extremely hard to send text messages and the cost would out way spamming people.

Paul Sylvester

 

 

 

 

Are you worried about your identity?

Paul

So after the fiasco of the other day, I decided I will talk about security and why you should worry about new websites that you have never heard of.   People are not worrying about there identity and keeping there identity safe.   You see whenever someone signs up to a service without thinking about their password being stored or even used maliciously.   You see when most people don’t use more than one or two passwords for all there accounts and then you use the same password with a new website.  Are you asking for your identity to be stolen?  In one of my previous blog posts I talked about not having any privacy on the internet.

So How can you protect your privacy?

When ever I come across a site that I don’t know about and I want to protect my account from being compromised I find out what I can from several places:

  1. [ad#ad2-right]Google — Yes this is quite common to use to find out about what people are saying asking the keywords like is it a scam or what people are saying about the site?  This can be very useful to make sure I don’t get scammed by a company for instants the Nationwide marketing scam.  Although this is really important when you get things that sound questionable.  This can be very useful with regards to keep your wallet safe.

  2. Whois Network — If there is a site you’ve not heard about and have a question about it you can always do a whois lookup.   This is a great resource for finding out how long the site has been up and who owns it?  The problem with this is most people who have a website aren’t worried about security and privacy.   So you make sure this site isn’t a phish site or to make sure the site isn’t being used improperly.

  3. Sitetiki —  a good site to do some research.   It’s a wiki like Wikipedia but for websites and if they are good or bad.  It also has a spammer list for people to watch and make sure not to go to.  These sites are usually redirect spam sites uses for email.

What about Personal privacy?

With this I also want to talk about security online to prevent people from gaining access to your accounts online by guessing the password.  Some sites also like to phish for your account information and use the information gained to take control over your account so here are some useful links to help protect your account information:

  • [ad#cricket-right-ez]Roboform — This is good for generating a really good random password and remembering it.  This will keep people from guessing the password and also make it easy to come up with another good password.  This will also fill out the required site forms that usually use to sign into website.

  • A good VPN Service —  If your like me and you have to use free wifi from time to time and want to make sure you have privacy on the net.  This is good for security on any open wifi network and you don’t want to have anyone watch you while your browse online.  In case someone is interested what VPN’s are used for here is the link to let people understand it better.

  • Perfect Paper Passwords — This is coming from Security now Episode 115 and he talks about this to better help people make the best possible passwords.  Listen to it and it will help you understand more about security.

These are just a few ways to prevent people from gaining access to an account.   After doing some research on this and thinking about this in bigger detail.   I would like to make a public apologies about the fiasco yesterday and what happened.  In all truthfulness everything didn’t seem right with the doings of the going on with website.   I also was worried about the twitter spam it was sending out as you started the service.   I didn’t know until later that it was a real person trying to make a product twitter users could really use.   I have learned from my experience and I will work harder next time and not be so quick to act next time.   If I was the company that bought that site, I’d also offer a job to both of them for being intuitiveness on coming up with a really good product.