Vodacom accused of turning a blind eye on spam

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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Over the past few weeks Internet users have grown increasingly frustrated with Vodacom about receiving spam originating from their network and for the cellular provider’s apparent apathy regarding the problem.  According to consumers the email messages are generally local banking phishing scams.

Many users feel that Vodacom is not doing enough to stop this spam on its network. “A few weeks back Vodacom was being lambasted for their failure to handle abuse complaints about their network. It seems that they have not made the improvements that were promised,” said one consumer.

One Vodacom employee said that the spammers often use multiple Vodacom SIM cards to send spam, something which makes it difficult to address.  He added that spam emails entering the Vodacom network are monitored constantly. 

Vodacom further said that the spam does not originate from Vodacom’s SMTP servers, but according to certain parties it is still Vodacom’s responsibility to stop the spam.  “While the phishing emails might not be sent from one of Vodacom’s SMTP servers, the phishing emails are in fact being sent from IP addresses assigned to Vodacom by AfriNIC, which means that the phishing emails are coming from Vodacom’s network, and it is Vodacom’s responsibility to put a stop to it.”

Vodacom doing enough to stop spam?

One industry player, who asked to remain anonymous, said that Vodacom is currently the biggest source of phishing spam and other Internet fraud in South Africa. “Many phishing emails and even 419 scams can be traced back to users of Vodacom’s 3G service,” he said.

“Many concerned Internet citizens have attempted to notify Vodacom of the problem but no significant actions have been taken on their part as the spam and fraud continues. Some evidence suggests that much of the fraud may in fact be from the same Vodacom customer.”

According to a report from the RIPE research unit there has been a significant increase in the number of blacklisted IP addresses on the Vodacom network due to spam.  This is also something which is of concern to certain Vodacom users.  “Currently I am on the Vodacom public IP range, so if they do not address this, it will mean that I may well get a blacklisted IP address soon.”

“Vodacom has previously been picked out by the South African Internet community for failing to honour Internet standards and best practices specifically with regard to having an abuse handling process and having contact addresses to report spam and fraud on their network. Many major ISPs are being ignored when they notify Vodacom of these problems and are resorting to blacklisting Vodacom’s network in order to protect their customers,” said the industry expert.

“In the past – failures by ISPs in Africa to deal with spam and fraud on their networks has resulted in entire ISPs and sometimes even entire countries being blacklisted or disconnected from portions of the Internet. This would be hugely detrimental to users since they would be unable to send email and may also be blocked from using other services on the internet. “

Vodacom was asked for their view regarding this problem, but the company did not provide any feedback by the time of publication.

Vodacom and Spam – comments and views