What’s the sound of 7.6 billion SMSes?

Hundreds of Indian businesses blast their customers with useless messages daily, creating an epidemic of digital cacophony where everyone shouts and no one hears anyone Illustration by C Y Gopinath using AI

The man at Cashify needed my mobile number to send me my receipt.
"No, you don't," I said. "Once you guys get a person's mobile number, you start sending them your
junk messages."
"We send zero messages," he lied with a straight face. "See, my number's on Cashify's database and I've not received one message."
"Listen," I said, my ire mounting. "I've paid for my second-hand phone now and I have the product. Just print the damn receipt."
"We don't have a printer," the fellow said. "And the transaction cannot proceed if any required field is blank."
"Take my email address," I said. He took it.
"The phone field is still blank," he said. "Shall I use my phone number?"
"Whatever."
"The receipt and warranty would be in my name, not yours. You ok
with that?"
He eventually won by exhausting me.
The first of many Cashify messages came a week later. Please rate your shopping experience.

Cashify is a small player in the big game of driving people berserk with torrents of messages, a worldwide phenomenon in which India, with 7.6 billion daily spam messages, takes third place after China and the USA.

The messages will thank you for the last transaction, ask you for feedback, request your participation in a satisfaction survey, make suggestions based on your previous orders, wish you a happy birthday several times a year, and invite you to spend more money on them. Sometimes they will impudently even warn you about (other) scams.

As spammers go, Vi is my clear front-runner, like an overflowing tap you cannot turn off. Built on the assumption that no Indian will pay their phone bill unless mercilessly browbeaten, Vi starts reminding me of upcoming bills a fortnight in advance, then again a week, two days, and one day before. In Vi's worldview, human beings live solely to pay their Vi bills.

After I'm billed, I will get progressively more menacing warnings, including endless trilingual phone calls about my mobile's imminent deactivation.

Meanwhile, Vi's cheerful promotions will also be streaming in, offering special-price family bundles, one-time deals and festival discounts. Every few days, I will also be told how to download my invoice, set up autopay and receive cashback deals.

One tone-deaf SMS promised me that Vi "will help you in fighting annoying SPAM messages" - by alerting me with yet more spam.

Vi is one of the hundreds of Indian businesses that bombard their customers with useless messages daily, creating an epidemic of digital cacophony where everyone shouts and no one hears anyone.

Few people today might know that spam is a portmanteau word derived from ‘spiced ham', a luncheon meat popular in the lean years after World War II. Spam soon came to represent anything unwanted and ubiquitous. Brad Templeton, a spam historian, says that to qualify as spam, the email or SMS must be unsolicited, unwanted and sent out in bulk. The sender must be a stranger to the recipient.

We used to know it as junk mail when it consisted of marketing mailers stuffed into your mailbox, with the sender footing the mailing costs. Internet bulk messaging costs the spammer almost nothing, though you bear the charges for increased memory and usage. You pay to be harassed.

Six in 10 Indians receive at least three spam calls daily, while nine in 10 get text messages on their phones. I, as a beloved target, routinely field as many as 20.

What can you do to stop the harassment? And will it work?

Try DND (Do Not Disturb) but keep your expectations low. You'll usually find it in the app's Settings. I found it and activated Full DND for my Vi post-paid account. The fine print said, "All promotional and service communication will be blocked except transactional communication". Perfect, yes?

Not quite. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) lists several types of SMS that may be sent even after a person has activated
DND, including -
Transactional messages (about shipments, sales, receipts, deliveries)
Political SMS (except during
elections)
Charitable SMS
Informational SMS
Survey SMS
Personal SMS

Telling me 10 times a day how to download my invoice and switch on Autopay sits comfortably in these categories.
Don't disclose your mobile number. You'll be asked for it casually as though it's perfectly routine. They'll tell you it'll make billing and shopping easier. They'll seduce you with frequent shopper discounts. They'll say the field can't be left blank. They'll say it'll make you irresistible. Remember: no transaction in India requires the disclosure of a phone number or email. Just start walking out of the shop and see how quickly things change.

Check what you're signing up for online. Sometimes, there's a pre-checked box in the fine print that permits them to flood you with whatever they want. Uncheck that.
The indiscriminate overuse of SMS to sell services and products is not different from hundreds of cars and autorickshaws blasting their horns at a signal crossing. Everyone is frantic, angry, impatient and aggressive.

Each honker believes that honking louder and more often is going to move the traffic. But the only result is ear-splitting pandemonium. Everyone is irritating everyone, and everyone loses.

There is one word that describes us perfectly when we behave like this.

Idiots.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com

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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper