Translated material
Attack of the pornographers
No one is responsible for dirty mobile content
Over the past two weeks, Moscow has been overwhelmed by a stream of electronic spam offering to view a collection of pornography of the kind that is prohibited by law in any civilized country (violent scenes). A link to the films is attached to the letter. A warning in the style of “Don’t follow this link, kids, the movie here is not for you!” looks like outright mockery! The child, of course, will immediately go to the site with Barbie dolls, who would doubt it.The link in most of these letters leads to an Internet page with another virus. As the leading anti-virus expert at Kaspersky Lab, Alexander Gostev, explained to us, spam mailings and pornographic resources often go hand in hand. However, in this case, no viruses were found on the site; the goal of the pornographers is to make money by watching films with scenes of rape. But the dirty porn dealers unexpectedly turned out to be respectable and law-abiding content providers, successfully cooperating with all mobile operators: money for viewing was collected through paid SMS messages to special numbers!
An investigation conducted by Mobile-Review.com found that the short numbers used to pay for the services of pornographers lead to a certain company “CMC”, which in turn is a partner of the quite respectable Russian company “Nikita”. Representatives of CMC, of course, deny their involvement in sending spam and put forward a version of the machinations of ill-wishers-competitors discrediting their good name. True, some unscrupulous “third-level partners” are also immediately remembered, for whose activities they cannot be held accountable. There is no one to blame. Despite the fact that the main consumer of CMC pornography is not adults, but children and teenagers.
After the publication of the material, the Mobile-Review website was disabled for almost a day by a massive hacker attack. The editors received anonymous letters from blackmailers who offered to stop the attack in exchange for the material with the text of the article about CMC to be removed from the Mobile-Review.com website and for the editors to no longer be interested in the peculiarities of this business. The material was not removed, the attack was repelled, and the pornographers simply transferred their “training aids” to another site and three days later resumed mass spam mailings with an offer to familiarize themselves with “useful content” - business should not be idle.
In this regard, it is worth asking a few questions. The first of them is to the Nikita company. Why does she collaborate with pornographers? It turns out that he cares about his partners: “We can technically disable this code word (the text of the SMS message confirming the fact of payment for the content of the CMC company - Ed. ), but all the services of the specified partner are based on this word. If this becomes a consequence of the unseemly actions of his competitors, then their goal will be achieved.” Nikita's position is clear - the company believes that formally it is not guilty of anything to anyone, and does not intend to be held responsible for the distribution of pornography. The next question is for mobile operators. Can they - MTS, Beeline and Megafon - stop pornographers from using their billing systems (that is, systems designed to record subscriber payments)? They can, but, apparently, not within the framework of the agreement concluded with Nikita. Cellular operators simply redirect all subscriber complaints to Nikita. The circle is thus closed, and the end of the long chain leading from the child to the pornographers cannot be found.
This, however, is just one, albeit particularly sad, example of the imperfection of the mobile content trading system. It is more convenient for porn businessmen than for subscribers.