Re: More SPAM?

[Ext User(Snapper)]

brian w edginton wrote...

> A query for the techies.....is it possible that spam can be directed
> to specific geographic areas?

You, like me, have had your number plucked out of possibly a random number
thingy. I haven't receive any such calls until last week when I received two in
as many weeks, both from different mobs. One was a betting mob, the other, a
trivia competition mob. Both of which were "giving" me $60 credits.

[Ext User(Rod Speed)]

Snapper <snapper1@y7mail.com.invalid> wrote
> brian w edginton wrote

>> A query for the techies.....is it possible that spam
>> can be directed to specific geographic areas?

> You, like me, have had your number plucked
> out of possibly a random number thingy.

It looks more likely he was targetted geographically.

Its certainly technically feasible for the system to work out
which mobiles are working thru particular mobile bases.

> I haven't receive any such calls until last week when
> I received two in as many weeks, both from different mobs.
> One was a betting mob, the other, a trivia competition mob.
> Both of which were "giving" me $60 credits.

[Ext User(John Henderson)]

Rod Speed wrote:

> It looks more likely he was targetted geographically.
>
> Its certainly technically feasible for the system to work out
> which mobiles are working thru particular mobile bases.

That suggests Optus is selling the info (about who is where)
based on its internal location registers. There are some
legitimate privacy issues in doing this.

The only other method I can think of for sniffing out who's in
the neighbourhood is Bluetooth. This is very short range
(could be hundreds of metres with the right antenna), only
finds phones with "discoverable" turned on, and doesn't give
away the phone number. So while a BT "message" can be
transferred, a voice call is out of the question without a
BT-ID to phone number lookup (which not even Optus has).

John

[Ext User(Rod Speed)]

John Henderson <jhenRemoveThis@talk21.com> wrote
> Rod Speed wrote

>> It looks more likely he was targetted geographically.

>> Its certainly technically feasible for the system to work out
>> which mobiles are working thru particular mobile bases.

> That suggests Optus is selling the info (about who is where)
> based on its internal location registers.

Not necessarily. They could be just delivering the spam SMS
to the mobiles that their system knows are in a particular area.

> There are some legitimate privacy issues in doing this.

Nope, not if they just deliver the spam SMS and dont
tell the source of the SMS anything about which mobiles
they sent the SMS to, just the total of SMSs sent etc.

> The only other method I can think of for sniffing out who's in
> the neighbourhood is Bluetooth. This is very short range
> (could be hundreds of metres with the right antenna), only
> finds phones with "discoverable" turned on, and doesn't give
> away the phone number. So while a BT "message" can be
> transferred, a voice call is out of the question without a
> BT-ID to phone number lookup (which not even Optus has).

But its completely trivial to deliver a spam SMS to mobiles
that have logged into particular mobile bases and dont tell the
originator of the SMS which numbers the SMS was sent to.

[Ext User(John Henderson)]

Rod Speed wrote:

> John Henderson <jhenRemoveThis@talk21.com> wrote
>> Rod Speed wrote
>
>>> It looks more likely he was targetted geographically.
>
>>> Its certainly technically feasible for the system to work
>>> out which mobiles are working thru particular mobile bases.
>
>> That suggests Optus is selling the info (about who is where)
>> based on its internal location registers.
>
> Not necessarily. They could be just delivering the spam SMS
> to the mobiles that their system knows are in a particular
> area.

The OP talks about getting a spam voice call based on location.
I agree that could have come from Optus directly rather than
compromising whereabouts info by passing it to a third party.

John