In September, many Sprint/Nextel and Verizon Wireless subscribers were the unwitting victims of text messaging spam promoting bogus energy stocks. While both companies moved quickly to stop the spam, consumers who opened the messages may have incurred fees of 10¢ per message opened. Users who feel that they were charged for opening spam text messages should contact their provider to get the charges removed from their bill. Verizon Wireless subscribers using the company's ?Get TXT? text messaging service may be able to protect themselves from some spam attacks by logging in to their ?Get TXT? accounts and enabling text message blocking for messages coming from e-mail and/or the Web.  Since so-called ?brute-force? attacks can be used to spam many of the e-mail and Web-based text-messaging services operated by most of the major wireless carriers, users may want to consider contacting their providers to see if there is some way that they can enable similar blocking measures as well. Doing so could save them the time and effort associated with calling a wireless carrier to argue about a particular charge on their bills.

Source: Telecommunications Research and Action Center. http://www.trac.org