For China Mobile, China Unicom, and the mainland's cash-strapped Internet contents providers, the 1 billion-yuan short message business looks great. But, for the mainland's mobile phone users, the short message service can be a tangled web of deceit and bitterness.
At a cost of only ten cents, the popular and affordable short message has become a good way for mainlanders to stay in touch with friends and families. But the short message can also turn nasty when it's in the wrong person's hands.
The Beijing Morning Post reported Monday that Zhejiang Police had arrested an extortionist who used the mobile phone short message and e-mail to extort money from private business owners in the province this year.
Mobile phone users have become frustrated by unsolicited short messages that show up on their mobile phone screens covering everything from product promotions to lewd jokes. One Beijing mobile phone user told mainland reporters he wouldn't let his son answer his mobile phone again after the son read a dirty joke on the phone. 'You never know what kind of message you'll get, or when it'll turn up, and what's worse, you never find out who the sender is,' said the angry father.
Another phone user complained that he had to switch his mobile phone off to avoid unwanted short messages, and that when he did turn it on, there was a backlog of unsolicited messages. In just one day he received 20 junk messages.
Liu Xuesong, who is in charge of short message services at the Chinese Internet portal Sina.com, told SCMP.com that telecoms carriers and ISPs could do nothing to stop the unwanted messages and that technically it was still difficult to track down the authors of unsolicited messages. China Mobile has promised it will study the technical problems of the short message service and that it hopes to find a solution.
