Salt Lake City — (KUTV) Sometimes it starts out with a text message from a unknown person saying, “Hey! I’m looking to have a bit of fun. Message me on here.”
The message is then followed by a link pretending to link to a shopping website. The next image is sexually explicit.
Thanks to a Utah registry, more than one million of these kinds of messages were stopped in Utah last year.
So, how do you protect you or your child from getting unwanted sexually explicit messages on their email or cell phone or report it if it happens?
Eric Langheinrich, the CEO of UnSpam, a company contracted with the state to help protect families from receiving harmful messages says don’t reply to them, but report them before deleting them.
In the last decade 500,000 Utahns have signed up to have messages like that blocked from their electronic devices, but it may not be enough.
But why are people sending out these messages in the first place without caring who it goes to?
Langheinrich said there are many different reasons and motivators for spammers. Some might do it for extortion, or sex, but the main reason for the majority of offenders is to get some extra cash.
“These people get paid to drive traffic to websites,” Langheinrich told 2News. “That’s the major driving force.”
You can register for free with the Utah Child Protection Registry. It’s where people can block unwanted adult content including alcohol, illegal drugs, tobacco, or gambling services, on their families’ mobile phones, instant messenger, email accounts, or fax.
Over the last year the Utah Child Protection Registry has protected 500,000 addresses on digital devices and stopped more than a million adult solicitation messages from arriving on Utahns’ devices, according to Utah Child Protection Registry spokesperson Michelle Scharf.
The registry, created in 2005, was modeled after the National Do Not Call Registry. Utah is one of two states in the nation to have the program.
Just like that registry protects the public from unwanted calls from solicitors or telemarketers, the Utah Child Protection Registry helps protect anyone from received unwanted adult-related solicited content.
He said the purpose of a link in the text message is to take you to a page that might look legitimate, then redirect you to whatever website is paying the spammer for the extra page views.
“It’s a way to mask where that traffic is coming from.”
Bottom line, affiliate marketers are trying to maximize what they are getting paid for visits to its website.
The text messages that contain links really help Langheinrich and his team track down the spammers and get them blocked and reported.
He says he would “not recommend the average person try to track these people down.”
Leave the investigating to the professionals by reporting the message to Utah’s Child Protection Registry the Utah Attorney General’s Office, or cell phone carrier to have them block and report the offending number.
“The carrier has the ability to shut down those numbers if they get enough complaints.”
