Fake Fapiao Inc.

From July 22 until September 20, your correspondent recorded every spam mobile phone text message received by my China Mobile number by forwarding the messages to a Twitter account.

There were 114 spam messages over the three month period. You can see the messages at Twitter.com/ChinaSpam. Most of the messages were from real estate developers and agents, home tutor services (especially those offering foreign English teachers), one particular Beijing nightclub, and companies offering fapiao, the tax invoices that allow a company in China to write off expenses against tax.

This type of spam is the target of frequent government clampdowns—the service is illegal—so many of the spammers write the Chinese characters as for fapiao as "发*漂" or "fa-票" or use other character combinations to get through the filters that China's mobile operators use to prevent this type of spam. Email spammers use similar tricks: see for example the JPG that was attached to a blank spam message offering the same service from an organization that calls itself "Fapiao Agency Company Ltd."

Things have changed a little in the last few years: In 2004, I collected mobile phone spam messages over a period of three months. The majority of them were for smuggled cars and cigarettes, but there were also messages advertising the services of hit men, prostitutes and black market gun dealers.

Not a single such message in 2008.

But the Beijing nightclub China Doll has done a stellar job of cluttering up my mobile phone's inbox in both English and Chinese.