Punitive action against SMS spammers â an interesting tidbit for reporting

Good work from the ICO announced earlier this week (17th December) concerning the successful prosecution of a payday loans firm and a fine of £175,000 for gratuitous spam texts.

You can read the detail of the case on the ICO website.

The snippet in the release that caught my eye – and that I think needs a bit more publicity – is the following:

You can also report spam texts to your network operator by sending them to ’7726′. The networks are working to block the worst offenders.

This would seem to be a much more useful and appropriate way of reporting spam. As someone involved in the industry, I’ve reported my fair share of texts (and calls) via theonline forms.

But most of the time, when I get these texts and calls, I am out and about, and not really in the mood to fill in free form text fields on my phone screen (optimised or not).

But the ability to forward such annoyances to my network (especially the deliberately hidden sender detail messages) so that they can be tracked properly and accurately via the transmission channels themselves makes it more likely I’ll report the spam, and I hope less likely that I’ll receive more of it!

Spread the word: forward spam texts to 7726