200 million Chinese mobile users get spam SMS

In a country the size of China with all those hundreds of millions of subscribers, when things go wrong, they can go wrong on a very large scale. Just ask China Mobile. According to Xinhua, seven online advertising firms “arbitrarily sent commercial text messages to over 200 million cell phone users” on China Mobile and China Unicom’s networks.

Xinhua said China Mobile will block SMS coming from the seven advertising companies and will work with all the operators to sort out rules on SMS advertising.

200 million messages – how did they manage it? The paper says that there isn’t much punishment for companies sending out junk SMS. That said, you would have thought the cost of sending out 200 million texts would be prohibitive enough.