JEDDAH, 9 December 2006 — Mobile phone owners are increasingly becoming aware of the scourge of SMS spamming.
“We give our phone numbers to our cousins, friends and colleagues — we don’t openly distribute them in streets. Yet somehow companies are getting our contact information and sending unsolicited messages to our mobile phones,” said Wajeeh Khamees, a Saudi marketing manager in Jeddah.
“And these messages are deceptive, telling us we’ve won a prize along with some invitation to go to a mall or a store,” he told Al-Madinah newspaper recently.
The paper said that mobile phone owners are complaining about the phenomenon of receiving unsolicited promotional material to their mobiles.
Khamees asked authorities to regulate the practice. “This is uncivilized and unethical,” he said. “There must be better ways to distribute advertisements and promote products and services. It’s irritating to wake up in the middle of night to the beeping of your mobile phone only to see a message that tells you that have won a car or a trip somewhere. People aren’t allowed to place advertisements on the outside of our homes or on our cars — so why should they be allowed to post on our cell phones?”
Muhammad Al-Masri, a public relations representative, said that many of these marketing ploys are illegal and sometimes they’re scams. But these pirate marketers are spurred on by the difficulty in tracking them down.
Al-Masri compares this to people who post advertisements or distribute fliers in the cover of night. “If you are to observe the way they distribute, you can easily tell that they know they’re breaking the law on posting,” he said. “They wait for your absence and leave you an ad paper next to your home or car.”
Illegal or simply unregulated, for no customer will simply have to tolerate the nuisance and hit the “delete message” key on their mobiles.
