Fight Cellphone Spam

You expect to get irritating messages like this in your email's in-box — but now they're headed to your cellphone as well. Just last week, subscribers of Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel were bombarded with 550,000 of these breathless text messages. While it remains unclear who or what company was the sender, Verizon has already begun proceedings for a civil case once the spammer is identified.

This incident is the latest in a growing trend of cellphone spam, says Linda Sherry, a spokeswoman for Consumer Action, a consumer advocate group. The reason? More people are giving up their landlines in favor of cellphones, which means those numbers are appearing on more order and contact forms — and are available for spying eyes to pick up and use use for unwanted texts and calls. (About 8.4% of households nationwide are wireless-only, according to CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group.)

Cellphone spam isn't just grating — it's also expensive. If you don't subscribe to your carrier's text message plan, you can easily pay 10 cents for each incoming text, solicited or not. And those incoming telemarketing calls can waste precious minutes.

So what can you do to keep your cellphone spam free? Here are seven strategies:

Add your name to the list
The FTC's National Do Not Call Registry, that is. Despite a rash of urban-myth emails (for details, click here), there's no national telemarketing directory for cellphone numbers — and no plans to create one. "It's illegal for a telemarketer to contact consumers' cellphones using an automated dialing machine," notes Joe Farren, a spokesman for CTIA-The Wireless Association. Still, the occasional call does get through, so it's worth taking 30 seconds to sign up, which protects your number for five years.

Safeguard your number
Even though your cell number is unlisted, it's still in company databases and other places (like your MySpace page or Craigslist ad) for unscrupulous types to harvest. But just because you're required to give a number doesn't mean it has to your cellphone number. Protect yourself by using one of the free services that offer disposable numbers (see our story for details). These services let you create an alternative number that automatically forwards calls to voicemail.

Download with care
Two bucks seems like a small price to pay to have your phone shout out the Super Mario Brothers theme. But when you download content to your phone, you may be unwittingly offering up your number to companies that will later spam you, warns Farren. So make sure you're downloading only from legitimate companies. Read the fine print to ensure that your number won't be passed along to third parties.