海角大神

Text spam hasn鈥檛 yet reached the plague-like proportions of old-fashioned email spam. Still, it鈥檚 a pain in the neck, and it鈥檚 apt to become more of a pain in the neck in years to come 鈥撀�, there are more than six billion cellphone subscribers in the world. You think advertisers and ne'er-do-wells are going to leave that kind of massive target audience alone? (Answer: no.)

So three cheers to the Federal Trade Commission, which says it will begin aggressively pursuing text-spamming marketers that run afoul of US law. This week, the agency filed eight complaints against 29 defendants, all of whom are charged with sending 180 million 鈥渦nwanted鈥� texts.

Those texts, the FTC says, promised the recipients gift cards to outlets such as Best Buy and Target. But if you clicked on the embedded link, you were brought to a page and asked to type in your credit card information before you could get your hands on the gift cards. Needless to say, it was all a high-tech hustle. 聽

"Today's announcement says 鈥榞ame over鈥� to the major league scam artists behind millions of spam texts," Charles Harwood, acting director of the FTC鈥檚 Bureau of Consumer Protection, says in a statement. "The FTC is committed to rooting out this deception and stopping it. 聽For consumers who find spam texts on their phones, delete them, immediately. The offers are, in a word, garbage."

It鈥檚 worth noting that the FTC can not immediately halt this kind of practice 鈥� only a federal court can do that. So until the eight complaints are adjudicated, just be careful not to click too wantonly on the link embedded inside a mysterious text message. You never know where it might lead.