SMS spam hasn’t quite yet reached the level of email, up to 95% of which is spam. Ranger says SMS spam levels vary from country to country, but in select Asian markets accounts for up to 20% of all text messages, whereas in Western Europe it’s less than 2%.
But Ranger says that given the volumes of text messages sent every month, even low percentages still mean millions of spam messages getting through to consumers. And it’s only going to get worse as spammers take advantage of unlimited SMS plans and messaging apps that makes SMS a more profitable spam channel than email.
“We’re seeing that many of the spammers coming to mobile are the same spammers who were using email, and they use a lot of the same avoidance techniques, and things like botnets to generate messages from multiple phones,” he said.
Other potential threats include malicious binary messages (such as the infamous “SMS of Death” reported in China) and “mischief apps” that enable users to text-bomb a person with the same message a million times with the aim of killing their phone, he added.