The province of Quebec receives the most SMS spam of all provinces.
Quebec was targeted more than any other province over the period, netting 39.6% of SMS attacks, followed by British Columbia (Vancouver) with 9.07%. Toronto, Ontario accounted a surprisingly low 4.11% overall. The specific categories consisted of ‘Adult’, ‘Aggressive Marketing’, ‘Giveaway’ and ‘Other’.
Adult spam was quite high in December specifically in B.C, attempting to get people into visiting an adult/dating site. The giveaway type of sms messages, and marketing spam attempts to tell subscribers that they’ve won some sort of a lottery or prize, while the ‘Other’ category hits your device in the form of a pharmaceutical giveaway or payday loan approvals.
“With the amount of SMS spam being sent to Canadians on the rise, we welcome the new anti-spam legalization which should help curb this trend by clearly defining what does and does not constitute messaging abuse,” said AdamptiveMobile’s Simon McGloin.
According to the CWTA, Canadians sent over 93 billion text messages in 2013.