BlackBerry Messenger Assaulted By Spam Again

Out of all the things I love about the BlackBerry Messenger, I can do without the ridiculous spam. This time it wasn’t a virus, it was a false message that is supposed to be from RIM. If RIM really wanted to contact you, don’t you think they’d pin or email you as they do for your OS updates?

This is the message as it went across:

Hello, greetings from RIM (Research In Motion) proprietors of BlackBerry. This message is to inform all of our users, that our servers have recently been really full, so we are asking for your help to fix this problem. We need our active users to re-send this message to everyone on your contact list inorder to confirm our active users that use BlackBerry Messenger, if you do not send this message to all your BlackBerry Messenger contacts then your account will remain inactive with the consequence of losing all your contacts.

We apologize for the inconvenience but this is the only way possible to resolve this problem. Sincerely Research in Motion. For more information visit:

www.blackberry.com/inactiveusers

A good practice to keep is to ignore such messages, only allow people you trust and value on your BlackBerry Messenger, and if you delete those who spam you, it also helps alleviate the escalation of such spam. If you receive such a message, you can try conveying to the naive contact that it’s a hoax and it’s spam, or you can delete them. Also if you are wondering if such a message is true, there’s always the snopes online base for common hoaxes and spam. Snopes has a great writeup about this hoax, and its variants beginning with Hotmail and ending with the BlackBerry Messenger, thanks to Barbara “The Hoax Diamond” Mikkelson

[via: Snopes]

Filed in: BlackBerry, RIM | Tags: blackberry messenger, broadcast feature, Hotmail, RIM, Snopes, Spam, Yahoo!