Men caught with gear for spamming texts

Two men have been arrested for using illegal telecommunications devices to spam mobile phone users with more than 1 million text messages in Jing'an district, local prosecutors said Friday.

The suspects, Fan Jiaxiang and Wang Guilin, were accused of disrupting the city's public telecommunication system because their messages interrupted the mobile phone service of their recipients, according to a press release from the Jing'an District People's Prosecutor's Office.

In September, Fan, a special sales fair organizer, asked Wang, his accomplice, to use a device called a pseudo base station to send out text messages that advertised one of his events, prosecutors said.

A pseudo base station is composed of a computer, a radio transmitter, an antenna and a mobile phone. The device can blast a signal so powerful that it can override the signals of nearby cellphone towers, allowing a spammer to send out thousands of text messages in seconds, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

Employing a pseudo base station is currently the most popular way to spam text messages to the public because its users don't have to pay the telecommunication operators to send out their messages, said Bo Haibao, the dean of the law school at Shanghai Finance University.

Wang set up shop in a vehicle outside the hotel where Fan was holding the sales fair and used the device to blast out text messages to passersby, prosecutors said.

These devices, which cost 2,000 yuan ($328) to 8,000 yuan each, can send messages to mobile phones within a 1 kilometer radius, Bo said.

Fan had bought two of the devices for 100,000 yuan from a man in Shenzhen, prosecutors said.

The Shanghai Radio Administration Bureau discovered that Wang was spamming messages on September 11 and confiscated the device. Jing'an district police arrested him later that day. A month later, authorities caught Fan using the other device to illegally send out text messages.

It is estimated that spammers sent out more than 200 billion text messages nationwide in the first half of 2013.

China's three mobile phone operators are responsible for some of the messages because they allow corporate clients to send out message en masse, Bo told the Global Times.

Although a majority of spam text messages are advertisements, some are hooks for telecom scams.