China to Probe Online Text Message Spam

Chinese authorities said Monday they are investigating complaints that millions of cell phone users were spammed with unwanted text messages from advertisers.

The uproar over what China's media has dubbed "Text-message Gate" has drawn apologies from a major advertiser and the country's biggest mobile phone carrier, China Mobile. The commercial text messages were sent to more than 200 million mobile phone users through two companies _ China Mobile and its smaller rival, China Unicom.

"We urge parties concerned to beef up self-scrutiny to correct their wrongdoing, which is profit-seeking in defiance of public interests," Liu Yue, deputy head of the State Council's Office for Rectifying Malpractice, said in a report posted on the Web site of the State Council, China's cabinet.

Jason Jiang Nanchun, chairman of Nasdaq-traded Focus Media Holding Ltd., an advertising network operator, issued a public apology last week.

"Jiang Nanchun did admit this in public, although there was nothing pornographic in the messages, just some ads," said a company spokeswoman for Focus, who gave only her surname, Wu.

"But the incident violated our company's rules and we are now working hard to fix the problem," she said.

China Mobile said it was shutting down Focus Media's message service port, preventing it from sending large amounts of short messages.

Both cell phone carriers also set up hotlines to receive consumer complaints.

A spokesman for China Unicom's Shanghai branch said the company was working hard to weed out spam messages. Violators are fined, and the worst offenders cut off from service, said the official. She, like many Chinese, refused to give her name.

Chinese cell phone users, who at more than 555 million are the biggest mobile communications market in the world, often receive unsolicited messages advertising cars, property and even fake documents.

Reports in the state media put the average received by local cell phone subscribers at eight per week.

Earlier crackdowns focused on Internet media companies sending unsolicited messages through cell phone text messages. The latest attack on cell phone spam began with an expose by state-run China Central Television, timed for World Consumer Rights Day on March 15.

Both the government and companies say they are working to clarify regulations on spam message identification and blocking. The absence of laws banning trading of personal information such as cell phone numbers was a key issue.

At the same time, Zhong Zhihong, an official at the Ministry of Information Industry in charge of information security, urged telecoms companies to do a better job of blocking spam, given that it was not technically difficult to do so, the official Xinhua News Agency said.