Government planning cellphone spam hunt

The government will begin a crackdown on illegal spam text messages sent to mobile phones. The Information Ministry said yesterday that recent studies showed that the average amount of spam mail sent daily to a person with a mobile phone went up from 0.9 messages last May to 1.7 this year. It plans to cooperate with the three mobile phone service providers to find the senders. The crackdown will last for at least two months. The ministry said that a new policy that takes effect in April prevents advertisers from sending spam mail without the consent of the user, so advertisers seem to be taking advantage of the remaining months before the activation of the policy. The ministry will operate dummy mobile phones as a kind of bait to monitor spam and will impose high fines on those caught in the net.