VietNamNet Bridge – The People's Committee of HCM City has proposed limiting spam by tightening management of pre-paid subscribers.

The committee has submitted the proposal to the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications.

It suggested signing contracts with pre-paid subscribers similar to post-paid contracts that include official subscriber information. It also proposed that the ministry create regulations about the number of SMS message.

Many subscribers have numerous activated SIM cards under only one registered name.

"All of these suggestions aim to find and punish those who send spam, but the ministry hasn't approved them yet," Le Quoc Cuong, deputy director of the city's Information and Telecommunications Department, was quoted as saying in the Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

According to the ministry's Information Safety Department, in the first 10 months of this year, telecommunications and mobile service providers stopped over 3.3 million subscribers who delivered spam.

Viettel revealed that in the last five months, it had stopped over 100 million spam messages.

VinaPhone has also locked access to 440,000 subscribers because of spam. Staff have been assigned to watch over pre-paid subscribers who have significantly increased their SMS messages.

MobiFone has completed its system to lock spam based on key words that have been collected. The company's hotline 9241 receives all information about spam.

Despite these measures, telecommunications and mobile service providers have said they could not stop all spam.

Companies cannot discover unexpected messages and subscribers sometimes send the same message to their relatives and friends.

Late last year, the ministry issued an instruction to stop spam and illegal messages as well as strengthen information management. The instruction asked all telecommunications and mobile service providers to try to stop spam.

To support the instruction, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung on October 15 this year said that all pre-paid subscribers must register with personal information similar to post-paid customers.

"The regulation is proper with the current situation. However, despite all regulations, already activated SIMs are available in the market," Cuong added.

Source: VNS