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New Research Claims iMessage Accounts for 30% of Mobile Spam Messages

Statistics...

Surely this is a meaningless number without:

  1. more details of how they measure it/what dataset they have access to
  2. what % iMessages make up of all mobile messages

After all, if iMessages made up 30% of all mobile messages, then spam would be at normal levels.
 
I've always hated that iMessage doesn't have a contact list, and it's not like Skype in the sense that you have "Friends" or "Contacts" and only those can contact you, avoiding spam completely. Instead, you have a list of 3000 people, of which 2990 cannot even receive iMessages, and there's no way of knowing who's online, who's offline, and who doesn't even own an Apple product. You add a contact with an email address or a phone number, and poof, you can instantly send them an iMessage. Doesn't mean they'll receive it, though.

So, it's not cross platform, you have no clue whether your iMessage will ever be received and you can't know if they're even online. So why not use Skype instead? Same thing without any of the disadvantages. Yes I know Skype sucks but it sucks less than iMessage.
 
Never had the problem myself. Just 10 million, billion, trillion, quitillion cold callers a day asking if I've claimed back my PPI yet, or more recently a new windows and doors scrappage scheme. Yet somehow I am owed PPI after having never been in any debt in my life...

I swear one day I'll have a mental breakdown and hunt down the bankers responsible for the PPI monstrosity they created and have them put in a padded cell so that they are forced to listen to cold callers every minute of every day. OK you yanks are probably lucky and have no idea what I'm talking about.

Cold callers are the bain of my life, like literally the only thing in my entire life that causes me grief and I'm signed up to the TPS and ex-directory.
I would honestly give them jail sentences fit for a rapist or murderer. The people I feel sorry for is the elderly who might be easily intimidated into paying out to these scum.

Back to topic, I hope Apple deals with these scammers, looks like most of them are out of China :rolleyes:. Seriously, who gets a message and thinks, bingo! Hang on while I send you all my bank details?
 
70s technology said:
Surely this is a meaningless number without:

  1. more details of how they measure it/what dataset they have access to
  2. what % iMessages make up of all mobile messages

After all, if iMessages made up 30% of all mobile messages, then spam would be at normal levels.
Click to expand...


Exactly. Tom is just twisting the situation.

Basically no one on andriod uses a net based messaging system instead of SMS. iMessage basically has not eqivalent on andriod. Hence imessage is way way more than 30% of all net based mobile messages. Probably closer to 95%+.

The whole thing seems compeltely bogus and just another publicity peice to sell span software to corps.
 
MartinAppleGuy said:
I can only speak for myself an everyone who I know has an Apple device (so we are talking lots of people :p ), I have never seen nor heard of any spam via iMessage.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've gotten spam text messages before, but not one single spam iMessage ever.
 
First iMessage spam

Interesting timing of this article. Just received my first iMessage spam this week. Reported it to Apple. If this is truly a greater issue, perhaps Apple needs to add a "Report as spam" toggle for incoming iMessages.
 

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baryon said:
I've always hated that iMessage doesn't have a contact list, and it's not like Skype in the sense that you have "Friends" or "Contacts" and only those can contact you, avoiding spam completely. Instead, you have a list of 3000 people, of which 2990 cannot even receive iMessages, and there's no way of knowing who's online, who's offline, and who doesn't even own an Apple product. You add a contact with an email address or a phone number, and poof, you can instantly send them an iMessage. Doesn't mean they'll receive it, though.

So, it's not cross platform, you have no clue whether your iMessage will ever be received and you can't know if they're even online. So why not use Skype instead? Same thing without any of the disadvantages. Yes I know Skype sucks but it sucks less than iMessage.
Click to expand...

Ummm turn on icloud contacts sharing, then you can select imessage to only work for your contacts... simple.

As to randomly entering email and sending a message to someone who you don't know if they recieve it or are online.... um hello.... thats exactly how SMS works. apples purpose was to essentially duplicate SMS but on the internet. The imessage WILL eventually say not delivered just the same as an SMS will eventually be nondelivered.
 
I guess I've been lucky, I've not really incurred any iMessage spam. Hopefully that will continue and apple will do a better job at blocking it as well.
 
LOL the only spam reported so far is a guy from 163.com - a site which sells your email address and activity to spamers... :)
 
No spam in iMessage here.

Claim seems a bit weird - if so many people on this board say they've never seen spam on iMessage, it can't be all that common. Not saying it doesn't exist, but it seems they pulled the exact number out of, well, you know what.
 
ciaocibai said:
turning off iMessage for people who aren't contacts isn't really a good alternative for me as I have to communicate with a lot of people in a lot of countries, many of whom I don't necessarily have contact details for ahead of time.
Click to expand...

So... how would this stop you? You need to know the address of the person if you want to contact them, and this feature would block incoming messages only. If it's a new message coming to you from a person for the first time, send an email first or simply failover to SMS.
 
I've never had spam via iMessage. But then, those who do, probably have their email address out in the open, so a bot's picked it up and verified it's an iMessage address.

I guess that's the downside to Apple letting people use email addresses for iMessages rather than some unique ID.
 
Ummm I guess everyone forgot the "block this caller" feature. It takes 2 seconds.
 
MartinAppleGuy said:
I can only speak for myself an everyone who I know has an Apple device (so we are talking lots of people :p ), I have never seen nor heard of any spam via iMessage.
Click to expand...

Same here. In fact if I receive an iMessage from an unfamiliar number it's usually a way I use to identify rather or not it's an actual person with a cell phone or some spammer which instead uses SMS.
 
myforwik said:
Ummm turn on icloud contacts sharing, then you can select imessage to only work for your contacts... simple.
Click to expand...

Where and how do you do this on the iPhone?

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Kilamite said:
I've never had spam via iMessage. But then, those who do, probably have their email address out in the open, so a bot's picked it up and verified it's an iMessage address.

I guess that's the downside to Apple letting people use email addresses for iMessages rather than some unique ID.
Click to expand...

Wrong. I personally do not have iMessage linked to my email. The spam iMessage I received this week came to be via spoof email address.

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luckydcxx said:
Ummm I guess everyone forgot the "block this caller" feature. It takes 2 seconds.
Click to expand...

Except for when the iMessage spam is sent to you from an email address. Regardless, like phone numbers, spammers seldom use the same email address more than once. So blocking doesn't usually keep them away.
 
a spam reporting tool. However, that tool remains a bit complicated to use, as it requires users to send Apple an email containing the screenshot of the spam message, the email or phone number it was received from, and the date and time.
Click to expand...

This could probably be easily automated. Use an AppleScript -> Python bridge so that Python can interface with iMessages and extract the relevant details, then use Selenium to automate filling out and submitting the form.
 
I started receiving spam messages last year. At first I tried blocking the user but when that didn't work I just changed my settings to only from contacts and that stopped it.

I love how people who've never received one automatically think others are lying about it :rolleyes:
 
Col4bin said:
Interesting timing of this article. Just received my first iMessage spam this week. Reported it to Apple. If this is truly a greater issue, perhaps Apple needs to add a "Report as spam" toggle for incoming iMessages.
Click to expand...

THIS! I just go this same message (but from a different email) last week and one similar to it the week before. Even back when I had my Verizon dumb phone ("texting" phone with a slide out keyboard and terrible UI) I got spam messages like this from emails, not phone numbers. And I didn't even have an email setup on it.
 
Applefan 2013 said:
THIS! I just go this same message (but from a different email) last week and one similar to it the week before. Even back when I had my Verizon dumb phone ("texting" phone with a slide out keyboard and terrible UI) I got spam messages like this from emails, not phone numbers. And I didn't even have an email setup on it.
Click to expand...

Interesting I got this same spam iMessage this week as well. First one ever. Although this article may be a bit alarmist, I hope they improve options on how to deal with this stuff.
 
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