European carriers aren't protecting against unsolicited messages, survey claims

By Mickey Alam Khan

December 29, 2008

"24 hours? Are you kidding me?!"

A new survey finds that 100 percent of the top 12 wireless carriers in Europe expect unsolicited mobile messages will increase as the adoption of mobile social networking and mobile email grows.

The survey, from mobile messaging security firm Cloudmark Inc., claims that only 16 percent of carriers are considering how to guard against mobile spam via mobile Web and email. That's two carriers out of 16 surveyed.

"Spam is going to be a big problem in 2009 and all of the operators agree," said JF Sullivan, vice president of marketing at Cloudmark, San Francisco.

"The vast majority are planning to do absolutely nothing about it," he said. "It's both email to mobile and mobile to mobile text messaging."

Carriers across Europe admit that up to 20 percent of their users are affected by SMS spam, per the survey.

JF Sullivan is vice president of marketing at Cloudmark

However, 83 percent of these carriers do not have a filtering system installed to protect their subscribers.

While the spam problem is acknowledged, one quarter of the surveyed carriers claim they don't have the budget to thwart the problem.

Another 25 percent of the surveyed carriers said they don't believe the spam problem is big enough or that they would deal with the issue at a later date.

Cloudmark claims that ignoring the mobile spam issue will lead to greater problems down the road, such as identity theft, phishing and fraud.

In a related survey run earlier this year, two-thirds of mobile subscribers would consider leaving their carrier due to spam.

Mobile spam is cresting 40 percent in India, 50 percent in China and 70 percent in Japan, Mr. Sullivan said.

"My advice to mobile marketers -- which I am not sure they can follow -- is they really need to band together to follow the standards and practices for mobile marketing," Mr. Sullivan said.

"Usually the operators would establish the precedents by which mobile marketers would play, but in this case, it's not happening," he said.

"So the onus is on the marketers to keep themselves from ruining the opportunity."