Cell phone spam

It’s the middle of the night. I’m sleeping like a little baby in my bed. I’m under my covers in the midst of the sweetest dream imaginable, and all of a sudden my phone begins blowing up with vibrations, melodic beeps and a light show.

Right on cue.

My phone experiences the most activity while I’m sleeping. For some reason that’s when Expedia decides to tell me about a limited time offer to take a Hawaiian vacation for 50 percent off.

I roll my eyes because, even though it’s a “limited time offer,” I’m sure it will still be available in a few hours when I wake up for class. Leave me alone, Expedia. I’m trying to sleep!

The worst part is that Expedia isn’t the only company contacting me late at night. I also hear from The Princeton Review, Sephora, iTunes, Apple and more.

Telemarketers have been infamous for calling households across America during dinner, asking people to drop their forks for just a moment to learn about a great deal.

Now, spam e-mails are sent out to e-mail accounts across the country at an equally annoying hour. These salespeople have never been able to pick a good time to get a hold of their potential customers.

While e-mail seems like a great, non-intrusive method in theory, those of us who get our e-mails forwarded to our cell phones might beg to differ.

We carry our cell phones with us everywhere we go and have become aware of the little things our phone does to notify us when we have a text message, e-mail, Blackberry message, instant message or phone call.

When we notice our phone reacting to an e-mail from a company that sent the same exact e-mail to thousands of other people, it’s like The-Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf Syndrome. It’s The Cell Phone That Cried Wolf. The next time I hear my phone notifying me of a text message, I might ignore it assuming it’s just more spam.

The other night I was sitting in my living room with my roommate and both of our phones started vibrating within milliseconds of each other. It was late at night, and we exchanged puzzled glances before checking our phones. Who would be contacting both of us at this hour? Sure enough, it was a mass e-mail from the Indiana Official Sports Report. We expressed disappointment that our phones teased us and began seeking ways to remove ourselves from these mailing lists.

Though many e-mail services like the Blackberry Enterprise Server and Gmail already have spam filters, these filters don’t catch spam masquerading as mass e-mails. Often times the messages are sent to customers who placed themselves on the e-mail list. At the bottom of the e-mails, there is usually an option to unsubscribe from the messages. I’m not sure if these messages qualify as spam since people volunteer to receive them, but I think every e-mail resembles spam through sleepy, annoyed eyes in the middle of the night.


E-mail: jzaslow@indiana.edu