Being bugged by spam? Report it now

If you live in Beijing and have bought a car or house in recent years, you should have already fallen prey to increasingly annoying and sophisticated spam text messages that dog you day and night.

A trickle of the unwanted texts started to arrive after I bought my home when I moved back to Beijing in 2005. They grew in intensity after I bought my first car a year later, bombarding me with offers from loans to sales promotions to housing advertisements.

Occasionally, the direct market is also laced with scams. Perhaps all high net-worth Chinese men, whose numbers the spammers have harvested illegally, have received texts from "college girls" who want to sell their virginity to raise money for their ailing fathers.

But as mobile users get used to the spam, arguably one of the most serious in the world, it has grown even more audacious amid repeated government crackdowns. In their own new normal, marketers and scammers have upgraded to cheaper and easier modus operandi.

They now can blast hundreds of thousands of messages a day with small gadgetry mounted on a car or even a motorcycle. People usually blame their banks, housing agents or their carriers and others who they do business with for leaking their phone numbers. But now they are clueless because perpetrators interrupt a cellular network and spam a whole shopping area or up-market neighborhood indiscriminately.

Spam messages have also been elevated from text-based to recorded ones that keep your phone ringing off the hook and can be sent out en masse, too.

So will spam ever be stopped in China? According to the latest survey results by a leading Chinese technology company, every day from January to September last year, more than 1.3 million new phone numbers were found to be created for spam. Beijing led Chinese cities with more than 4 million such new numbers in the nine months.

We could blame the loopholes in the Chinese laws and rules that have never amounted to serious deterrents to spam. There is also a lack of respect for privacy in the traditional Chinese psyche.

But let's admit it: consumers are also partially responsible for the worsening unwanted messages and calls, because they are tolerant of this pestering behavior. We know we can report the spam, but probably nobody would take the trouble unless they cause serious monetary or emotional damage to us.

Although fines for spam have been recently raised to 30,000 yuan ($4,800), the pestering may well continue if spammers reckon the punishment will only fall on the unlucky few and rewards far outweigh risks.

For the past year, I've received the same text offering "hotel-style room services" by a bevy of international students, models and office workers. Sometimes I wonder why nobody has reported the messages and the contact information to the police.

Perhaps that is exactly what encourages the abuse - because we all think it is someone else's job to do something about it.

Contact the writer at dr.baiping@hotmail.com